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You certainly know spring is just around the corner when groups of American robins start showing up, looking for those early worms! Indeed, flocks including hundreds of robins can sometimes be seen as they push northward to their breeding grounds. Traveling in flocks provides the advantage of safety in numbers from predator attacks and flocks seem to have better success at locating the limited food supplies that are available in early spring. Once they reach their nesting destinations, the flocks disperse and establish individual nesting territories.

Probably triggered by lengthening daylight hours and internal hormones, American robins surge north from their wintering grounds in the southern United States, regardless of the local weather conditions. You might have noticed that almost all of the early migrants are brightly colored males. There are distinct advantages to the birds that arrive in breeding areas in the first waves of migration — choice of the best nesting sites with the abundant food supplies and the ability to defend those areas as their own territory.

Unfortunately, the early birds don't just get the worm, as there is a risk to migrating early. Sometimes they starve to death, encountering late winter storms that make critical food supplies unavailable. Robins are hardy critters, however, and most can survive on fruits, berries and rose hips from the past season, even if no worms are yet available in the frozen snow covered earth. But for the successful early migrant males, when the ladies arrive they have already staked out a nesting territory and are ready to start the annual cycle of courtship, nest building, egg laying and raising of young.

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