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Grackles are of the Icterid family, the New World family of birds that includes blackbirds, orioles, oropendolas, meadowlarks, caciques, the Bobolink, and cowbirds.  The word grackle derives from the latin word graculus*, which describes the small European corvid, the Jackdaw, which some grackles vaguely resemble.  There are eleven species of grackle, or, there were, but [...]

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these sunken eyes and learn to see.  All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to [...]

Do you live in the southeastern United States (broadly defined)?  Are you a birder?  Then you should be helping count Rusty Blackbirds (Euphagus carolinus) right now!  Over the last forty years Rusty Blackbird populations have cratered, dropping between 85% and 98%.  Obviously, something is drastically wrong and the Rusty Blackbird Working Group and eBird have [...]

Sometimes an easy bird can become difficult to identify.  Such was the case with the molting bird below, a species that has crossed my path hundreds of times.  It is an icterid, a family that includes blackbirds, grackles, orioles, cowbirds and meadowlarks, but beyond that I was temporarily stumped.  My birding partner for the day, [...]

Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a marvel of modernist poetry. It is only 246 words long, divided into thirteen sections, each labeled with the corresponding Roman numeral, and a surface reading will show that it is about, not surprisingly, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. Reading deeper, though, [...]

The Yellow-headed Blackbird I spotted back in the beginning of July is still hanging around the West End of Jones Beach. It is regularly sighted and reported on the listservs and I was pleased to see it in the median near West End 2 today in the middle of a day of birding. [...]

When I arrived at Jones Beach on Thursday morning I planned to check out the area around the Coast Guard station for early migrating shorebirds and to photograph some terns. Was I ever surprised to see what I presumed to be a female Yellow-headed Blackbird!
I first saw the bird foraging in the grass just [...]

In the same walk that netted me these deer photos I also apparently wandered into the breeding territory of a male Red-winged Blackbird. Unfortunately for the bird and its offspring it had chosen rather marginal turf to try to breed in, in little tiny patches of cattails along a path. Needless to say, [...]

After work on Tuesday Daisy and I headed over to Papscanee Island for a snerklefork (our much better term for “picnic”) in the remaining hours of daylight (how great is this whole early daylight savings time thing?). The thick snow that blanketed the ground on my last visit was greatly reduced, which made the [...]

One of the abundant benefits to keeping a nature journal, whether a blog or a book, is the opportunity to analyze species counts at your favorite birding spots over time. For example, I’ve been in the practice of visiting Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx every January. The main draw is Rusty Blackbird, [...]