With patience you might be able to start hand feeding a Robin. We’ve been lucky enough to have a resident Robin that is brave enough to come and eat out of our hand. He or She became very reliant on us during winter. It even got to the point where we couldn’t go out the front door without having a supply of peanuts in our pocket.
At different points in time, we have had various small birds that will take food fro our hand. However this robin was quite special. It would even come and sit on the door step of our glass doors until we gave it a peanut.
Before you ask. No, a robin can’t swallow a whole peanut, and struggles to break it up. Which means we would have to break it up before feeding it to the small guy.
When it was particularly cold during winter, this robin would puff up into a feathery ball. This gained the little bird the name of Robin Fluff Ball. This was quickly shortened to R-Balls.
A Robins Life Span
Unfortunately, Robins only live for an average of 13 months, so we knew our time was probably pretty short with this new friend. After all, by this stage we had already had eighteen months with our resident robin. If a robin survives for the first two years, then it’s apparently likely that it may live for 4 – 5 years. The oldest known robin was recorded as 19 years old. So we had hopes of a long friendship.
The sad truth is, that the video footage from the clip at the top of the page, is the last we saw of our feathered friend. None the less, it’s better to have had the experience and the friendship (albeit based on food…) than not to have cared at all.