By Charlie Frisk
Correspondent
For many people, the American robin is considered the first bird of spring.
However, if you know where to look, you can find robins all winter long in Northeast Wisconsin.
This has been a particularly good year for seeing robins in the Baird Creek Greenway.
The two most important things to help locate winter robins are to be able to recognize their songs and calls, and to search in the right type of habitat.
I hear robins at least once a week on my walks at the Baird Creek Greenway. I almost always hear them call before I see them, and in most cases I would walk right by if I didn’t hear them.
The best source to learn robin calls, or any bird calls, is to download the Audubon Bird Guide App. The App covers appearance, calls, range and habitat of 800 North American bird species.
Robins are most likely to be found in habitat that includes winter food sources and open water.
Anyone that has a bird bath will tell you that no other species of bird seems to enjoy splashing in water as much as robins.
It is very unscientific to think that birds can experience ecstasy, but it sure looks like robins are close to that when I see them splashing in a bird bath or an open spot in a stream.
Look for the robins to be in a flock. In the summer they are typically paired up and territorial, but in winter they group up.
In the summer robins eat mostly worms, but once the ground freezes or is covered with snow, that food source is not available.
The winter robins are surviving as frugivores, which means they eat primarily fruits and berries such as crabapples, hawthorns, holly, wild grapes and juniper.
They may also eat some insects, and I have seen them eat suet at my birdfeeders.
So, you will be most likely to find winter robins in locations that have open water and a source of fruits and berries.
If you have robins in your yard, you can keep them around by providing blueberries, grapes cut in half, cranberries, apples slices and raspberries.
They also love mealworms, which can be purchased at bird seed suppliers and pet stores.
It helps to soak the mealworms in water before putting them out. A heated bird bath will also attract robins.
Try to put the food in natural locations on the ground or suspended in shrubs, because robins don’t go to birdfeeders very often.
One of the great beauties of nature is that there will always be questions that have not yet been answered.
Why do some robins stay in Wisconsin all winter, when most of their cohorts migrate?
How do the survival rates compare for the stayers versus the leavers?
Is it the same robins that stay every year, and is the behavior genetic or learned?
There are some great research projects in those questions.
Humans are highly visual, and we have to sort of train ourselves to rely more on sound.
Experienced birders always “have their ears on,” whereas most people don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the sounds around them.
Once you have trained yourself to listen, you will see and identify many more birds and even some mammals, such as foxes.
Winter is a good time to start to learn bird calls, because they aren’t nearly as many species around as in other times of the year.
If you can familiarize yourself with the calls of the woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees, cardinals, bluejays, robins, goldfinches, house finches, barred and great horned owls and house sparrows, you will be able to identify most of the birds you hear in the winter in the Green Bay area.
Mourning doves rarely call in the winter, but their wings produce a very distinctive whistling sound.
In late January and early February, great-horned, barred owls and red foxes will be courting and mating, so they will be particularly vocal, and you have a good chance of hearing them if you go for a night hike.
Once you get tuned into listening for bird calls while on your walks, you will be amazed at how many birds you had been walking by without realizing they were there.
On some of my walks I notice other hikers wearing earbuds.
I love music as much as the next person, but by wearing earbuds, a person is greatly reducing contact with nature, especially the “cheery up-cheery o” of the Wisconsin state bird, the hardy American robin.
Bay Area Birds is a monthly column written by local ornithology enthusiast Charlie Frisk.