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According to Birds of North America Online, the Great-tailed Grackle’s (Quiscalus mexicanus) breeding range has been expanding northward for several years. I must say that I agree with their assessment because we have been seeing more of them in northern California every year. Some fellow Audubon members recently spotted several male and female Great-tailed Grackles [...]

On my last beat post for 10,000 Birds I talked about how to avoid European Starlings at your seed feeder.  You can also avoid them at your suet feeder too. It’s not a one hundred percent solution, but it works to keep most starlings, grackles and crows from the feeder. Let’s watch this video of [...]

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 [...]

I’ve recently discovered that if I hustle out of my office for my lunch hour, jump on the uptown C train and get off at 72nd St I can spend some time birding the west side of Central Park while I work my way north to 81st St to get on the downtown C train [...]

The grackle is the ultimate American bird, adaptable, intrepid, and obstreperous. Ten species of these iridescent ebon irritants, most in the genus Quiscalus, are distributed throughout the New World. The banner blackbird of most of Mesoamerica as well as much of the southwestern United States is the Great-tailed Grackle. In fact, this aggressive avian ambassador [...]

Grackles are intimidating birds, there’s no denying it. With their dagger beaks, sinister strut, and evil yellow glare, they often seem as if they’d as soon kill a body as look at him. The grackles in Texas seem especially threatening. At the risk of anthropomorphizing avifauna, I’d say that the Lone Star birds bear malice [...]