#icterids

Great-tailed Grackle Quiscalus mexicanus

My favorite thing right now is forward-facing Brewer's Blackbirds. Just so you know.

For Halloween this year, consider forgoing the common raven decorations for a bronzed cowbird! These birds boast all the mystique of the black plumage, and adds to the spooky effect with blood-red eyes! Bronzed cowbirds are especially scary for other birds, as they are known to parasitize the nests of over 100 other species.

Icterus bullockii | Icterus cucullatus nelsoni | Icterus parisorum | Pyrocephalus rubinus mexicanus

Feathursday Icterids

On this first Feathursday of the New Year, we present four members of the Icterid family of New World blackbirds that are common here in the Upper Midwest. From top to bottom, they are:

Yellow-headed Blackbird  (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus) 

Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus)

Bobolink, male and female (Dolichonyx oryzivorus)

Western Meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta)

This image is from a painting by the German naturalist artist and ornithologist Anton Göring ( 1836-1905), reproduced as a chromolithograph in our 2-volume set of Our Native Birds of Song and Beauty, by the late-19th-century director of the Milwaukee Public Museum Henry Nehrling (1853-1929), and published in Milwaukee by George Brumder (1839-1910) from 1893-1896.

View more posts from Nehrling’s Our Native Birds.

Boat-Tailed Grackle (Quiscalus major)

Family: American Blackbird Family (Icteridae)

IUCN Conservation Status: Least Concern

Native to the southeastern USA, the Boat-Tailed Grackle shares much of its range with the closely related Common Grackle, but can be distinguished from its relative thanks to its larger size (Growing to be around 40cm/15.7 inches long compared to the around 32cm/12.6 inch long Common Grackle) and its considerably longer, broader tail, which is present in both sexes but more prominent in males. Found largely in coastal habitats (although they may also be found near large inland bodies of water or in human settlements where they feed on abandoned food scraps), members of this species roost in large, loosely organised flocks that may contain hundreds of individuals, and which scatter during the day to feed on seeds, fruits, insects, eggs and small vertebrates such as frogs, fishes and occasionally smaller birds before gathering back together at dusk. Boat-Tailed Grackles mate in the early spring (with a male establishing a strictly-guarded territory and producing a high-pitched mating call to invite a large number of females into it) and nest during the late spring and early summer (with several females constructing small, cup-shaped nests among dense elevated vegetation within close proximity to one another to increase the likelihood of potential predators and egg thieves being spotted, and 3-5 pale, speckled and striped eggs being laid in each nest.) Females of this species have pale brown bodies and dark brown wings, while males (such as the individual pictured above) are nearly twice the size of females and possess iridescent black feathers that reflect light in such a way that they may appear purple, blue or green if seen under bright sunlight. As is true of many grackles the males of this species are frequently mistaken for crows (with the word grackle being derived from the Latin graculus, meaning “jackdaw”, in reference to the two small species of Eurasian crows known collectively as jackdaws), but despite their superficial similarities grackles and crows are not closely related (with grackles and their fellow American Blackbirds being more closely related to the American Sparrows of the family Passerellidae.)

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Image Source: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/9601-Quiscalus-major