Our singling out of this one bird is embedded even in the very name we use. We are so familiar that we can forget how robin is a shortening of Robert. An older name for the species was ‘redbreast’ and ...

Both the male and female American robin are gray-brown birds with yellow bills and reddish-orange breasts, but the male’s head is usually darker than the female’s. Robins in the eastern part ...

And that is why every Robin born ever since has been born with a red breast. But the splash of colour on the breast is not red; it is orange. That discrepancy is explained by the fact that the ...