Date: 3/25/25 9:06 am From: Gyekis, Joseph Peter <jpg186...> Subject: robin update
Hi Everyone,
At the end of the Steven Kress puffin talk at Palmer, I stepped outside for 3 minutes and despite it being quite dark there were a surprising number of robins streaming in (~290), and that inspired to me to finally take Doug's advice to do robin roost counts from that side.
So far as I know, most of the robins sleep in the area between the botanic gardens of the arboretum and the intersection of north burrowes and hillcrest in east college heights.
When counting from the Nittany Deck (my usual habit since February), the robins can be seen flying northbound (coming in from the south) to the roost area each evening at sunset. In early February I was averaging around 5 thousand birds per night, and that's dwindled to mostly under 2 thousand lately.
However, counting from the arboretum side of the new Palmer Art Museum and especially looking northwest toward Hartley wood, I've been getting a lot more birds coming southbound into the roost each night.
My last 3 counts from Nittany Deck averaged 1500 robins per evening, while my last three counts at the arboretum are averaging over 7000. (I wonder if I had counted from there in Feb when I was getting ~5k from Nittany Deck would I have been getting 4x more from the arboretum back then?!?).
