Dear Jerry,

Like most cats, I love watching robins. They hop across the grass then pause and tilt their heads to one side. Soon —jab!—they pull a wiggly worm from the soil.

I asked my friend Heather Watts what those robins are doing. She’s a bird scientist at Washington State University.

She told me that robins use two senses to find worms.

“The existing evidence is that they use both visual and sound cues to find worms,” Watts said. “Depending on the environment, they might use one more than the other.”

Sometimes robins see what they’re hunting. They may notice tiny movements in … » More …