WITH most of the trees having lost their leaves in readiness for the coming winter, gardens can often look rather bare.

However, this drabness does seem to focus the attention on the wonderfully colourful small birds that have opted to brave out the British winter in our gardens.

One bird that always brings a smile to my face when it appears in my garden is the robin. Its cheery colours and almost fearless nature makes it a most welcome companion when I carry out garden chores.

It is also one of the few garden birds that is quite happy to deliver a pleasant and cheerful song even now as we head into the depths of winter.

If you look at the distribution of robins throughout the country, you will soon discover that the majority have chosen to live in close proximity to people and are thriving in our gardens and parks.

Before people took over the land the robin would have found its niche in the natural world living in our woodlands.

There it would have lived within scrub trees underneath the main woodland canopy foraging for invertebrates from the woodland floor.

In the warm summer months it is not that difficult to spot insects running over the leaf litter in a wood. Just stop and look for a few seconds and you will soon spot a wolf spider or a harvestman scuttling over the dried leaves.

Come winter, however, most invertebrates much prefer to live under the leaf litter away from the worst of the weather. This would have presented a fair problem for the robin as it is far too small in stature to start rummaging and turning over the dead leaves that could easily be tens of centimetres thick in some woodlands.

What the robin did, and still does in some parts of the world, is to follow a family of wild boar around, then fly in to pick off insects disturbed through the diggings of these animals.

These days, wild boars are a bit of a woodland rarity, so the robin has been fortunate enough to have found another animal to help support its rather specialised lifestyle.

That animal is man, which as luck would have it for the robin has turned out to be rather successful as he has quite the passion for digging things up.

Hence, the robin has thrived and now lives quite happily alongside us in our gardens and parks.