About Author
How Bobby the Robin came to be created?
My wife had bought a small fluffy toy Robin, which the Grand-children adored. When they had a stopover I used to make up stories about the Robin. Bobbing it across the bed as I told them the story. This leant itself to the Robin being called Bobby. I did not know it then, but observing the Robin’s feeding in the lane through the kitchen window, I saw they did indeed bob along rather than fly. I had long forgotten the stories I made up. When the Great-grand-children came along, it seemed a good idea to write them down for the Great-great-grandchildren when they come along.
The stories which I have subsequently written owe themselves to watching the behaviour of the birds at the feeding stations in the garden. All the activities by the various birds and their interactions have been observed by the author.
To get the stories going I used the fact that Robins are very territorial and will fight, sometimes to the death to defend their territory. Youngsters on becoming an adult are driven from the nest by the parents and have to find a new territory away from the parents. This formed the basis for the First Adventure of Bobby the Robin.
Seeing a Robin fly out of our shed one day, which had a hole at the top, I looked in and found a Robin had built a nest in one of our many orange plastic flower pots, one of which had a dead plant in it. It was used until late spring, when one day the Robin was gone and never came back. That gave me the idea of it being a temporary home and formed the basis of Bobby’s adventure in Book 2.
The interaction of the birds, came as a result of watching the birds feed at our feeding station just outside our kitchen window. The Blue tits and the Robin’s feed quite happily alongside one another. The Sparrow’s however come in numbers and frighten all the other birds away, except the Blue tits. They just look up, ignore them, and carry-on feeding. The author has expanded this to form the basis of the friendships that run throughout all the books. The mob action of the Sparrows enabled me to weave in the Children’s Nursery Rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin.
All the scenes in the book are based on the woods and fields around the author’s house in France. All the birds introduced in the stories are seen in the fields and woods. Including the Grand Duc (the French name for an Eagle Owl) which the author witnessed in an event not suitable for a children’s story. It did lend itself to portraying him as an autocrat in charge of the Woodland community and nicely enabled me to use the name as like a Duke with his Dukedom. A lot of the birds names are French and leant themselves to becoming first names of the birds. Like Martin the French name for a Kingfisher and Gobbemouche for a Nightingale and his nickname of ‘Gobby’. I have also drawn on dialectcal names, like Madge for Magpie.
About The Books
The back story of the Bobby the Robin Adventure stories.
The Bobby the Robin stories take place in the Grand Duc’s estate in England. The Grand Duc is an Eagle Owl and is French and he has another estate in France. The English estate runs like a medieval fiefdom and is administered by his Senechel (steward) who is a Buzzard. He ensures the Grand Ducs rules are followed. It has a modern administrative system with a Mayor, (a Jackdaw called Jack), a Sheriff, (a Crow called Choucas), a Judge, (a Jay called J), and a committee. Composed of a Woodpigeon, called Columbus, a Chaffinch called Frin, a Nightingale (Gobbemouche in French) called Gobby, a Pipit called Pip, a Woodpecker called Woody, the community carpenter and a Blackbird called Merle, the community Undertaker. In addition there are two lawyers, the Public prosecutor, a Magpie called Madge and a Public Defender a Little Owl called Athené.
The stories embrace modern social concepts and problems, like immigration, racism, single parenthood, and food banks and as such are an allegory of life as was and is now.
The stories start with Bobby being evicted from his home, according to Robin law, as he is now considered an adult. They follow his life’s experiences (adventures) in the wood owned by the Grand Duc.
