Last week my husband noticed robins on our front hill. It was the first time we’d ever noticed robins in winter. Aren’t they supposed to be the harbingers of spring? I keep a 365-day journal in which there is a page for each month and day but the year isn’t specified. I write nature observations on the day they happen and note the year in the entry. My goal is to have this book forever and someday to have all these entries trigger happy memories of our time in our country home in the Driftless area of Wisconsin. There are at least a couple entries on different days in March for “Spotted the first robin of spring.”

So much for that.

As it turns out, some robins don’t migrate at all. Winter robins, sometimes called “nomadic robins,” shift their diet from insects and worms to fruit and other plant matter, eating what’s leftover in the woods. Juniper berries, staghorn sumac, and and dogwood berries are on the menu. Plenty of that around here.

Nomadic robins form flocks of 15 to 20 birds I’ve read, unlike the territorial behavior of migrating robins in summer. Suddenly another observation we’ve had makes sense. There have been stretches of days in the summer or fall when a flock of robins descended on our hill at almost the same time each evening before sunset. They’d stay for maybe ten minutes feasting and then take off as a group again. It was so remarkable we’d be at the windows around the noted time to see if they came back. Now I highly suspect those were a non-migrating group.

I guess when March rolls around I’ll have to amend my entry to “Spotted the first migrating robin of spring.”