Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 4, 1992 TAG: 9203040269
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MAG POFF STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Phyllis Harholdt, who lives on Norwood Street Southwest off Mud Lick Road in Roanoke, said robins have been swarming like locusts near her home lately. The robins blanketed a half-acre of her yard and another half-acre across the street, she said.
The first time was about two weeks ago, Harholdt said. But Friday they arrived in the morning and spent hours in the neighborhood.
"They were covering up the birdbath," Harholdt said. "Twenty at a time."
Wayne Slusher of Roanoke said he saw a similar swarming of robins just off Interstate 81 near Lexington as he and a friend drove toward Harrisonburg.
They blackened the sky and the side of the road, Slusher said. The swarm reminded him of other types of birds, but not robins, gathering in the autumn for the trip south.
"It's called staging," said Jerry Via, professor of biology at Virginia Tech.
Robins are starting early toward their breeding ground in the North because of the warm weather, he explained, and they migrate at night.
In the daytime, the robins settle down to rest. Via said they hear others calling and tend to land together.
Sometimes the birds don't like the flying conditions, Via said. The wind may be too high, or it may be blowing in the wrong direction.
In such a case, he said, the robins "wait it out." That means more and more of them tend to collect on the same small piece of ground.
Thelma Dalmas of Lynchburg, an official of the Virginia Society of Ornithology, said the robins are two weeks early because "they just didn't go very far" south.
Unlike most birds, she said, robins migrate in response to the weather rather than to hormonal changes. In the winter, she said, "the whole population just slides south."
In a warm year like this one, Dalmas said, they stayed so close that they didn't have far to come back. Hence the early schedule.
A lot of them, in fact, never left at all. Dalmas said the society's annual bird census in December found an unusually large number of robins hanging around Roanoke and other southern areas of Virginia.
by CNB