The American Robin is a familiar sight across North America, often signaling the arrival of spring as it forages on lawns. The nesting period demands immense energy, as adult robins must find enough food to support their rapidly growing young. Nestlings are altricial, meaning they hatch blind and helpless, and are completely dependent on their parents for nourishment. This requires parents to shift their diet and foraging behaviors to meet the offspring’s high requirements.
The Essential Menu: Invertebrates and Soft Foods
The diet of baby robins is overwhelmingly composed of soft-bodied invertebrates, providing the high levels of protein necessary for rapid development. Earthworms are a staple, often pulled from the soil and delivered whole or in pieces to the nestlings. A single young robin may consume a surprising amount of this protein-rich food during its two weeks in the nest.
Parents also forage for other soft insects like caterpillars, grubs, and various larvae. This focus on soft-bodied prey is deliberate because young nestlings cannot properly digest hard exoskeletons, seeds, or tough fruit skins. For the first few days after hatching, parents may even regurgitate partly digested food to ease the transition to solid meals. The high moisture content of this invertebrate diet also hydrates the young birds, so parents do not typically bring water to the nest.
Feeding Frequency and Parental Roles
Feeding the young is a round-the-clock commitment requiring intense effort from both parents. Nestlings grow from tiny hatchlings to nearly adult size in about two weeks, demanding a constant supply of food. Parent robins may make up to 100 or more feeding visits to the nest each day, with the female often being the more frequent feeder.
Parents must work from dawn until dusk, often delivering food every few minutes during daylight hours to a brood of three to five chicks. They typically place the food—whether a whole earthworm or a large insect—directly into the chick’s gullet, prompting the nestling to swallow the entire meal. The success of this high-frequency foraging depends on the quality of the parents’ territory, as they cannot afford to travel far from the nest to hunt for food.
The Shift to Independence: Fledgling Diet
The diet begins to change once the young robins leave the nest, a stage known as fledging, which typically occurs 13 to 16 days after hatching. Fledglings still rely heavily on their parents for food for several weeks, but their diet starts to incorporate a wider variety of foods, moving closer to the adult omnivorous diet. Parents introduce non-invertebrate items like soft berries and small pieces of fruit, which provide energy as the young birds learn to forage. Parental feeding frequency gradually decreases as the juvenile robins become more adept at finding their own meals. The male parent often takes over the primary care of the fledglings while the female may start a second nest.