The Life of the Robin

THE robin regularly tops the vote in public surveys to find Britain’s national bird. The reasons aren’t hard to imagine. A Christmas-card staple, the bird is familiar and attractive. It has a sweet song, endearingly heard at times of the year when other birds are silent and often in the evenings or late at night, seduced by the glow of streetlights. A regular garden visitor, it’s loved for its tameness. It can be trained to take food from the hand, and may even enter the home to feed or perch on an armchair.

- David Lack

It’s fitting, therefore, that it was also the subject of the first popular monograph dedicated to the study of a single species of British bird, David Lack’s The Life of the Robin (1943). Whereas Edgar Chance’s much earlier The Cuckoo’s Secret (1922) had also been devoted to one species, it had restricted itself to a single issue, that of the cuckoo’s parasitic nesting behaviour. Lack’s book was a wide-ranging study, embracing all aspects of the robin’s lifestyle.

Lack was a biology teacher at Dartington Hall School, near Totnes, Devon, when he carried out his fieldwork on robins in 1934–38. Dartington was an unconventional boarding school, where pupils could decide for themselves whether to attend classes. Initially, Lack started the fieldwork to stimulate their curiosity, but he became increasingly absorbed in the subject on a personal level. The Life of the Robin, written in an accessible, although, by modern standards, distinctly unflowery style for the lay reader, was completed during free evenings when on wartime service in the Army Operation Research Group.

An ornithological colleague of Lack’s once mentioned how he considered himself the last of the amateur bird ecologists, but he was also one of a new generation who put the study of birds on a more rigorous scientific footing in the mid 20th century. Although his book was anecdotal in style, Lack noted in his preface that his behavioural observations were set down only where an action had been observed on at