Ruddock

Blip journals are currently full of Christmas trees, baubles, decorations and other festive scenes. It's four weeks since my last Christmassy blip, so today's robin is another nod towards the time of the year. I only needed to take one step from our back door to capture this image on what was for us another grey and damp day.

The robin has an association with Christmas which is thought to go back many centuries. Mark Cocker in Birds Britannica muses that "there may even be a dash of paganism in our choice of the robin as the bird of Christmas. Like the holly wreath with its bright red berries, it provides a splash of colour in a dead world." There is also its general place in our affections, an attractive little bird that is one of the few that sings in the depths of winter, even in the hours of darkness. And there is its tameness and association with our gardens, the gardener's friend who waits nearby for the gift of worms and insects as we turn the soil .

The robin must surely feature more than any other birds on British Christmas cards. This association apparently goes back to the 1860s when the custom for sending Christmas cards first became established. David Lack, whose research on the robin was one of the first ecological studies of a single bird species, found that there were early prototypes of Christmas cards with a robin bearing an envelope in its bill. The association was in part because of the red livery of Victorian postmen (and still of postboxes and the Post Office), and Robin was a nickname given to postmen at that time.

Because of our affection for robins, attempts were made to introduce them to the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But these all failed, unlike so many introductions which have proved regrettably all too successful. So instead, in some cases we have given the name to native species. The American robin is in the same family, but is more closely related to our thrushes and blackbirds than to the European robin.

The British bird is a separate race from the continental birds, and apart from its plumage differences does have a more confiding personality.

Ruddock, by the way, pre-dates the name robin, and is derived from Old English and obviously alludes to the red breast.

If you have read this far, then for another bird blip, please see the Ice Runner from a year ago, still one of my favourite blips, and one of those unrepeatable and unpredictable moments. Through reflex action I was lucky enough to get a photo of a water rail making a dash across open ice from one reedbed to another. Water rails rarely venture from the deep cover of a reedbed.