Winter birds

I live in central Florida. We know it's winter up north, when flocks of robins arrive, fan out into the surrounding neighborhood, and bully the resident mockingbirds and cardinals. The robins stay for 4-6 weeks, gorging on the fruit of crape myrtles, hollies, and other scrubs. One evening, they come together into a big flock, and are gone the next morning. I've often wondered how they know that its time to go.

Me too bsharf. I wonder if it have to do with day length or temperature or a combination of many things. We have some robins year round but not nearly as many as in the summer. So I wonder if ours leave and go south and our winter ones are from further north. Or if just some of our summer residents decide to stay.

I've read they like to be in the woods when the warmest weather comes along.

bsharf--your robin observations are interesting (and funny)! I've never heard anyone up here in Ohio describe the robins as bully birds! But I suppose they are down south!

I just took them for granted until someone else posted another link on a robin thread from Journey North website that described some of the American Robin's migration habits. I thought it was pretty interesting.

http://www.learner.org/jnorth/search/RobinNotes3.html#banding

Actually, I've heard that robins will move southward during winter. So the Tenn. robins may go to Florida, and the New York robins may go to Tenn. When we lived in central Penn., we would have a few robins in the winter. Maybe they came from Maine. I think that summer songbird ranges have also moved northward. 30 years ago, mockingbirds were a big deal in central Penn. Now they are common in central Penn. Here in Florida we have a lot of Carolina Wrens. The day we moved here, and we were unloading the moving van, a Carolina Wren flew through the open garage door, into our house. It was a job catching it, and putting it outside. I later learned that it is considered to be good luck, in some countries, to have a wren in your house. Last year a wren got trapped in our screen porch (lanai). We were trying to catch it with a fishing net, and our cat was also trying to catch it. The cat won out, and was very indignent, when we took it away from her, and let it loose outside. The cat sulked for the rest of the day.