i've decided i'm going to learn more about yellow-headed blackbirds than anyone else. this is a strange and almost juvenile-sounding goal but no one seems particularly interested in studying them. if you try to search for information on them or certain behaviors you get the generic field mark and blurb guides, a few paywalled academic articles, and... posts by me, funnily enough. i just made a separate blog for my bird photography, but expect another at some point specifically focused on my documenting the colony of these birds that i now visit weekly.
i'm not a spiritual person, nor do i believe in the prophetic power of dreams, but i do think they serve as important windows into our fears and motivations and i think it says something that the only time i have actively photographed a bird in my dreams it was indeed a yellow-headed blackbird.
look at my blackbirds boy
the more i read about these birds the more insane i feel. i think the isolation of this tiny marsh might actually be doing some galapagos shit to the blackbirds there because everything from their vocalizations to their nesting habits completely eschews known data.
did you know that they are capable of imitation? don't worry! apparently no one else does either, but i have personally overheard them doing terrible approximations of not only red-winged blackbird songs, but also rooster crowing, ring-necked pheasant squawking, and what i now believe to be an eastern meadowlark song (which i have captured on video, something about which no one gave a fuck!!)
they are supposed to be drawn to marshes with deep water, over which multiple females will weave nests in single male controlled territories of typically 1k to 6ksqft. the waters of this marsh are wading depth, and the males control micro-territories of what cannot be more than 500sqft each-- territories that they share neutrally with marsh wrens.
this marsh is the last surviving 50 acre oasis of wetland in what used to be hundreds of miles of it, now turned into farmland. yellow headed blackbirds have been migrating across this continent for over 100,000 years according to fossil records. how does one compromise with their instincts telling them to travel a specific, ancestral route that looks and feels nothing like what their genetic memory tells them? they adapt, or they disappear, and a bird like this could never accept silence. i don't think.
I don't know how or why, but sometimes a species reaches out to you to be its caretaker and you just gotta answer the call.
Everything about this is delightful, I'm so happy for and impressed by OP, adopting an entire colony of birds and sharing them with us all. Which makes my personal revelation here feel silly in comparison, but you just solved a mystery for me.
Recently I found a big cheap "canvas" print at the thrift store, the sort of thing that's mass produced to look good in online listing but is noticeably cheap in person. But I loved the colors and the anatomy was surprisingly good, so it came home with me. At a glance it seemed to be an oriole with questionable fidelity, bafflingly posed on some cattails. I didn't think much of it, birds in art are full of bad anatomy and species all smushed together. At least it isn't a macaw with a crest. But as soon as I saw the photos here, I realized it's actually extremely species accurate, I just didn't know this was a species to consider
Thanks OP I love my yelling bird even more now
