A robin: inside her small dark eye, a quantum entanglement

What is the poem about”Who Killed Cock Robin?” It is so sad, and so coolly dark: a miniature drama set in the shadow of a single tree. The sparrow confesses immediately, and no one cares. The fly – “I, said the fly, with my little eye I saw him die” – is a witness of whom no questions are asked. Everyone seems eager for the funeral, eager to help, insincere in their mourning, “sighing and sobbing”.

Everything is small. The fish that catches blood in its “dish”, the tower that plays pastor with its “book”. The death of a little bird, and a funeral for a bird the size, and almost the shape, of an orange, and weighing no more than an orange segment.

Long ago, the feathers on the robin’s chest were called “red” because there was no word for the color “orange”. In Old English for 1,000 years there was only the word “geoluhread” or yellow-red, according to David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthingtwo academics who are a book on the history of colors. The word orange became a color name when the fruit was introduced to Europe in the 16th century. For Chaucer, a fox’s color was “between yellow and reed.” To Shakespeare, a beard was “orange-tawny”.

For Mark Ford, the robin’s eye was “gimlet”: “why / did he not spy / with his gimlet eye, the impending / danger”. The robin can detect the earth’s magnetic field. Inside her small dark eye, a quantum entanglement (according to one study): electrons do not touch, but influence each other.

Wired explain it like this:

One of the electrons migrates a few nanometers away, where it feels a slightly different magnetic field than its partner. Depending on how the magnetic field changes the electron’s spin, different chemical reactions are produced. In theory, the products of many such reactions over a bird’s eye could create a picture of the Earth’s magnetic field as an alternating pattern of light and dark.

Robins use the pictures in their eyes to migrate between Africa and Europe. They use their sight to follow you around the garden in the winter, hoping to catch a worm dug up from the hard ground. You are tired; you hang up your jacket and go inside for breakfast. When you come back at lunch, put your hand in your pocket: three very small eggs.

Robins will put their trust in any small cavity: a flower pot, the handlebars on a bicycle, an unmade bed. It will keep me young, they think, it will keep them safe.

The term “babes in the wood” comes from a folk tale that ends with two children dying “in each other’s arms”. Robins cover their bodies with leaves. There is a quantum entanglement in a Robin’s eye: Earth’s light and dark, safety and shelter and children.

Emily Dickinson saw Robins this way: