Figure 1 – American robin, Fresh Pond Reserve, Cambridge, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

he Shakers taught us that there is, or can be, beauty in simple, everyday things.  In the United States there is no bird, save perhaps the sparrow, that is more common than the American robin.  They are everywhere, paying quintessential homage to the saying that “the early bird catches the worm.”  And everywhere that you go the air is filled with their call.  Still if you stop and think about it the American robin, despite its inauspicious genus name of “Turdus,” is quite a beautiful bird.  Indeed, its orange breast can be so brilliant that it often is mistaken for a Baltimore oriole, of one our most dramatic birds.

I have been holding off photographing one. But yesterday I came upon this most handsome example on the path at Fresh Pond.  He struck a most characteristic pose, breast pushed forward regally like a soldier stnding at attention and he exposed the dramatic pattern around his eye. As the Shaker song goes: “‘Tis the gift to be simple,” and certainly “‘Tis the gift to be free, ’tis the gift to come down where we ought to be…” And if you analyze it, isn’t this why we photograph birds.  We admire their simplicity.  We admire their Darwinian resilience against a benign and often malignant nature. We admire their species specificity and complex instinctual behavior. Andm of course, we most of all admire them their freedom to fly.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 180mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode at 1/400th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.