Many people's living rooms are full of robins on Christmas cards at this time of year.

But few can compete with Oxford biologist Andrew Lack'scollection off robinabilia.

As well as Christmas cards, there are stamps, envelopes, china and cartoons, fairy stories, myths, nursery rhymes, poems, epitaphs and novels.

Nothing is too trivial for him, except round robin letters, which have nothing to do with the bird.

And now he has put together an anthology called Redbreast: The Robin in Life and Literature.

He said: "It is truly astounding. The more you look at literature, the more you see robins.

"There are old songs, like Who Killed Cock Robin? which merits a chapter on its own. Where does it come from and why does it persist?

"Then you have the Babes in the Wood. The one thing everybody knows about the Babes in the Wood is that the robin covered them with leaves, and so you get a tradition of robins burying the dead.

"Then there is the red breast - the fires of hell or a drop of Christ's blood from the Cross. "There was also a robin that came to Queen Mary's funeral in 1695 and sat on the coffin. She was very popular, and it was seen as an omen. Whether it was a good omen depended on whether you were a Catholic or not."

The robin was one of the first birds to have its own biography, The Life of the Robin, written in 1943 by Andrew's father - the ornithologist David Lack, who died aged 62 in 1973.

Andrew's mother, now 91 and still living at his childhood home in Boars Hill, was also an ornithologist.

But when he was eight, Andrew became interested in plants, and he is now an expert in plant pollination and genetics, though he has remained a keen bird- watcher.

Now 54, Dr Lack has lectured at Oxford Brookes University for the past 20 years and has a reputation for identifying any plant from a scrap of leaf, or a bird from the slightest call.

His anthology is a reworking of another book by his father, published in 1950, but now out of print.

  • Redbreast is published by SMH Books and is priced at £19.99.