DEAR JOAN: Have you noticed a huge increase in the number of American robins flying around? Many of my friends have also been commenting on this year's "robin invasion." I have seen large flocks of them in Walnut Creek, Oakland, even Vacaville. Do these birds migrate? Do you have an idea as to why the population is so high this year?
DEAR KRISTA: American robins are considered migratory birds, but at any given time of the year you will find them in the Bay Area. This, a bird expert explained to me, is because migrations occur at different times as birds search for the food they like and for romance. So the robins you see in January may not be the same ones you see in March, and so on.
The reason you are seeing such large flocks now partly is because that's what robins do in the winter. With a limited supply of insects to eat, the birds feast on fruit -- mostly berries -- during the colder months. For reasons best known to the robins, they gather in large flocks and hunt together.
I checked with a few birding enthusiasts and a number of factors are in play this year including a relatively mild winter.
The northern migration of robins appears to have started earlier than usual this year. We've seen an influx of birds into the area, where they overlap with the birds already in residence.
One expert says the high number of robins seems to correspond with a lower-than-usual number of cedar waxwings, often seen with robins at this time of the year.
The waxwings tend to eat every berry they can find, stripping bushes and trees with impunity. The robins aren't quite so greedy. They eat what they want and move on. The leftover berries may then be attracting more robins to the feeding areas, which in turn may help explain the large flocks you are seeing.
It's impossible to say if there are more robins out there than usual, but birders say anecdotal observations indicate there are.
DEAR JOAN: Is there a product on the market that I can spray or pour on a cat pan to get cats to use it?
Cats are pooping in my front yard and ignoring the cat pan in my backyard. They walk past the cat pan to lie in the sun, so I'm sure they are aware of it.
I've tried spraying citrus-scented odor remover in the front yard, but cats poop there anyway.
Thanks for any help you can give me on this.
DEAR CAMILLE: There are products that you can buy to spray on the litter to attract cats to the box (Cat Attract, for example), but I think you'd be fighting a losing battle and wasting money.
If a cat has its choice of the great outdoors or a tiny litter box, it's not going to choose the box. It is going to go where it wants to go, and where other cats have gone before.
Instead, focus your efforts on keeping the cats out of the front yard.
There are a number of things you can try -- repellents, sticking chop sticks into the ground 8 inches apart, a product called CatScat, which is an assortment of small plastic mats that are rough on cats' feet but don't injure them in any way, or an ultrasonic, battery-operated cat repellent with a motion detector.
For an organic solution, my friend plants a large patch of catnip in the corner of his yard.
The cats come in, get high on the catnip and forget why they came into the yard in the first place. They then stagger off home without defiling a single blade of grass.
Joan Morris' column runs five days a week in print and online. Contact her at firstname.lastname@example.org; or P.O. Box 8099, Walnut Creek, CA 94596.