Glacier Park robin family an Internet hit

The trials and tribulations of a nesting pair of American robin are proving to be a hit on Glacier National Park's website, even though there's been a tragedy in the family.

On June 17, employee Jean Ervin, who works in the Park's mailroom, noticed robins were building a nest in a bush outside her window at Park headquarters.

Park webmaster Bill Hayden heard about the nest and since he had a spare webcam available, he decided to train it on the feathered friends.

Since the robin-cam has gone online, page views to the Park's webcams have shot up between 20 and 30 percent.

The robin laid three eggs, but the evening of July 4 — the day they were expected to hatch — something got at the eggs and appeared to have eaten all of them, save for one. The remaining egg appears to have a dead chick underneath the remains of the shell. At first, the female sat on the shell and the remains for hours, but has since left the nest.

The failure of the nest brought despair from folks.

"WOW, nature can be so sad!!!!" posted a viewer on Glacier's Facebook page. The robin tragedy drew 78 comments on Glacier's Facebook page, which now has more than 26,000 fans.

Hayden said Park staffers are letting nature take its course — they haven't done anything to protect the nest from predators. The nest is about 6 feet off the ground.

The future of the nest appears uncertain. The female could lay another clutch of eggs. American robins have been known to raise two broods in a year, sometimes even three, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Glacier's webcams are already very popular. On average, the page that features the cameras gets about 7,000 to 8,000 page views a day.

With the nesting robin, page views have shot up to 10,000 to 11,000 a day.

Glacier's webcam page is the eighth-most visited page in the National Park Service, Hayden said. Yellowstone Park's Old Faithful webcams and the National Park Service's main site take top honors. Glacier's webcams are slightly less popular than the view of the Grand Canyon.

You can view the robin cam as well as a camera trained on an osprey nest in St. Mary at http://www.nps.gov/glac/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm.

The osprey are raising three chicks.