Genetically encoded robins

I HAVE been adopted by a wild bird. Every time I go outside it appears within minutes and follows me around. It gets very close. It’s a rather odd sensation. The bird is an immature robin, still in its speckled baby plumage.

Robins have a habit of becoming tame but, up until now, I had assumed this was something they learned. I thought they watched people and noticed they were sometimes a source of food, unearthing worms while they dug in the garden, for example, and they posed no real threat. But my new friend is far too young to have learned anything like this so I have to assume that its tameness is genetically inherited.

Sometimes young birds can ‘imprint’ on humans and treat them as if they were their parents. This mostly seems to happen with water birds. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz described it in geese and it once happened to me with a water hen chick. But I don’t believe that the odd behaviour of my baby robin can be adequately explained by imprinting. I think something else is going on.