The Urban Pantheist

I need to post these pictures before I load the new batch on to Photobucket or I'll go batty! This little guy was stuck to the zoo hospital one early morning. He was gone later when I remembered he was there.

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Yesterday I had to go to work, to put in my mandatory special event time. Since for some reason there isn't much traffic on Sundays, I got there early. That was good, as it gave me a chance to go for a walk on the snow, and then I came across something pretty cool. In the trees overhead was a mixed flock of blackbirds. After I shot this video, I went to go see what they were. There were 30 or 40 male red-winged blackbirds, and a dozen or so starlings. I thought I heard grackles, but I wasn't certain that I could see them. There could have been other kinds of blackbirds--brewer's, bronzed, or rusty, or maybe some brown-headed cowbirds, but I could only make out the redwings and starlings.



This video is for listening. Close your eyes and enjoy. For the birdos, how many species can you pick out?
The woodpecker was on the other side of me, in the deer enclosure. I never saw it.

Urban Species #080: Common grackle Quiscalus quiscula

To many people, a grackle is a mundane sight: a common blackbird feeding in a field or a suburban lawn. But in Boston, in March, we need all the harbingers of spring we can find, and the grackles' return should be as welcome as any. Their black feathers, caught in the sunlight, contain some of the loveliest irridescence of any of our common birds. And their grating call, like that of the European starling, is surprisingly complex. They return in early spring in huge numbers, all glossy purple and bronze, sounding like a hundred rusty hinges creaking and clattering (My partner, cottonmanifesto has described the sound of a flock of grackles as a "continuous car accident.")

Human use of the land over the past few centuries has been beneficial to the grackle. The clearing of the dense forests of the east helped their spread, and the farmland that replaced the forests provided new sources of food: not only the crops, but especially the rodents and insect pests of the crops. To the west, the ornamental shrubs and trees that now pepper the suburbs have allowed grackles to spread in that direction. In the south and southwest the common grackle is joined by much larger relatives. Along the coast of the southeast, and the Gulf of Mexico, there is the boat-tailed grackle Quiscalus major; throughout the southwest and expanding northeast, is the great-tailed grackle Quiscalus mexicanus. These two species are very similar--in fact they are sometimes considered the same species--and look a lot like common grackles but are much larger, with a much larger tail. Also the male and female look more different from one another than in the common grackle, females of the large species are brown and smaller than the males. All three grackle species are urban--in parts of Las Vegas for example, a challenging city for an urban naturalist, the great-tailed grackle is the most conspicuous urban bird.

While flipping through a field guide this morning (NERD!) I discovered that I have made a reporting error! At some point, I said that the boat-tailed grackle (Quiscalus major a big black bird that makes a wonderful cacophany of metallic noises) was the most common urban bird we saw in Las Vegas. Oops! That bird isn't known to occur in Las Vegas, so either we made a fascinating discovery, or an error. We weren't looking closely enough to make a discovery.

The real most common urban bird of Las Vegas is the great-tailed grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus, a different species of big black bird that makes a wonderful cacophany of metallic noises). Honestly, there isn't a whole hell of a lot of difference between these two. Fortunately, there is very little overlap in their ranges in North America. I saw the boat-tailed in Jacksonville, Florida, and the great-tailed in Las Vegas.

In Las Vegas, I was in my brother's residential neighborhood, in my wedding suit, getting ready to test ride my brother's bike, when I said "which one of your neighbor's has a parrot?" The parrot-like calls (in intensity, really, more than tone) were male great-tailed grackles.

Now I'm planning on maybe checking out the black birds down on the Riverway. I'd assumed they were common grackles (Quiscalus quiscula, medium sized black birds that make a wonderful cacophany of metallic noises), but upon browsing the field guide (NERD!) it seems like they may be rusty blackbirds! (Euphagus carolinus)