Column: Robins are flocking to San Diego — and no one knows why [Breaking]
“When the Red, Red Robin ” ... A lot of San Diegans these days may be singing that catchy tune recorded by Al Jolson in 1926.The NextDoor online app, where local residents post items of interest, is teeming with observations:We are so excited by the robins. Came home to a yard full of them about a month ago. Is this in San Diego? I didn’t know we had robins here.
On one recent morning, Paul Lehman, who was longtime editor of Birding magazine and created bird range maps for field guides, counted about 1,500 taking flight at dawn from trees at the San Diego Zoo where they had roosted overnight. So, imagine bird watchers’ delight when a bird count Dec. 23 in Escondido recorded 695 robins, and a Dec. 27 count in Rancho Santa Fe logged 3,789. “The robins’ long downhill slide locally makes his year’s invasion all the more surprising,” Unitt says.
It’s not unusual to see a robin or two at higher elevations, such as in Julian, or the Palomar, Laguna and Cuyamaca mountains, he says. Unitt theorizes they may be coming from northeast of us, from the Great Basin and Rocky Mountain states where there is a heavy snow pack this winter. Perhaps some of the robins’ fruit-bearing shrubs failed to produce this year.