Location Back yard (Gillette Ave.), Hilliard, OH
The American Robin, along with the American Goldfinch, and to a lesser extent some other species like the Red-winged Blackbird, is the bird that got me interested in birds in the first place.
That may seem strange since the robin is such a common bird -- a bird that someone grows up with and is used to seeing. But I grew up in an area where robins were not common yard birds. It was only after I moved to Ohio that I became familiar with them. Indeed, I was fascinated by them.
This amused my wife because she, a "non-birder" (more on that in my entry for meadowlark), knew that they were a common sight. It's like getting excited over a sparrow or a crow.
But for me, they were new and interesting. They were quite tame and ubiquitous. They had attractive coloring and a pleasant song. They would build nests near your house.
Like several birds early on, this siting was certainly not the first, but it was deemed the most "interesting" siting to that point, so it was recorded here as bird number 15. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was in the backyard. I was apparently good enough with bird sounds at this point that I recognized an unfamiliar sound coming from the neighbor's yard.
I went over there to hunt down what it was, and it turned out to be a fledgling robin hopping along the ground. It was struggling quite a bit to fly, and I wound up virtually cornering it by the neighbor's house. Then it managed to fly into a nearby tree.
Cornell: American Robin
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