I am incredibly lucky to have Robins nesting in my garden at the moment.  As a birder and photographer with a blog called  "Wildlife In a Suburban Garden"….well it doesnt get any better to be frank. I put this down to the way that I have left some of the garden to go wild, I have deliberately left an area of lawn un-mown and put rotting logs there to attract invertebrates….food for the birds of course. I have a tiny wild pond with no fish because they would eat the tadpoles and it's teaming with them and all other manner of insect life as well as a toad.  Both the adult Robins are attending to their recently hatched chicks constantly and its been interesting to observe the different behaviour of the two birds. The female is much, much more confiding and will almost take food from my hand, in fact I am sure she would if I persisted. She will take the mealworms freely, eat some for herself and then take one or two back to the nest box.  I observed this today and its the first time I have been certain that she took prey in to the nest box. She will then stay in the  box to brood the chicks before coming back out again after 20 minutes or so. The male will search the garden for a variety of prey and collect a beak full which takes quite a while before he takes these in to the nest. He is far less interested in the mealworms and more wary of me.  He never broods the chicks!  You can see in the photo above that he has quite a collection.

I have been trying see if there is any noticeable difference between the sexes.  This is the female and you can see that there is just a few russet feathers that spill on tho the flanks whereas in the male these do not exist.  Whether this is coincidental or not, I am not sure.  The female is slightly, but ever so slightly, smaller than the male and I think she may be slightly less bright but it is really hard to tell.