The Life of the Robin!

Our book today is a wonderful little classic of popular natural history: David Lack’s The Life of the Robin from 1943, in which Lack takes everything known about robins from literature, poetry, and science and pulls it all together to craft a portrait-in-the-round of one of England’s most common birds. “Into the world of the robin we cannot penetrate,” he writes, but his own book – which sold briskly and was reprinted many, many times – comes as close to doing just that as any book could hope to do.

Lack’s prose is clear and smooth; his book reads effortlessly, and his low-key delivery can sometimes downplay the contentious nature of some of the insights he conveys. Watching robins for hours and days and months on end disabused him, for instance, of any idea that these little creatures were mere automata. He noticed personalities, as all bird-watchers do, and he grounded everything in enormous amounts of first-hand observation:

While the sight of red breast feathers normally elicits threat display from the owning cock robin, there is one particular set of red breast feathers which does not produce this effect, namely the red breast feathers belonging to the bird’s own mate. Similarly the hen possesses the shape of a robin but is not struck, and flies away but is not pursued. She has even sung occasionally in her mate’s territory without evoking any hostile demonstration. Clearly the cock distinguishes his hen individually, which is a warning against interpreting his behaviour too rigidly …

The Life of the Robin is a generous little book, often ranging far and wide from its strict subject. In its own quiet, buttoned-up way, it’s also a boisterous book, Lack’s first foray into the publishing world where he would go on to write a small shelf of classics, almost all of them showing a blend of analysis and anecdote that always manages to be both authoritative and fascinating:

Once when I was trying to catch an elusive robin in the house-trap the bird burst into song as it ran about the ground, and it continued to sing for a little after I had caught it and was holding it on its back in my hand. It is well known that other birds will occasionally sing or display when alarmed. A sudden thunder-clap or bomb often starts them off. As a more spectacular example, when in an Imperial Airways machine over the Kenya Game Reserve, we on several occasions flew close to a male ostrich, at which the latter would go down in the sand, spread its white plumes, and rock gently from side to side in display at the aircraft.

This is the kind of natural history gem that’s truly timeless, stepping outside even the natural fluctuations in population and conservation that happen to any species (even any urban species) in this new epoch of “the Anthropocene.” As a tribute to the combative complexity of the robin, it can’t be beat, and re-reading it always makes me wish equivalent volumes existed for every single species of bird. Where’s the magnum opus for Passer domesticus, one might plaintively ask?