Boat-tailed Grackle - Quiscalus major

 

The Boat-tailed Grackle was once considered the same species as the Great-tailed Grackle, though its body size is larger, it has a longer tail and lacks the Great-tailed Grackles’ distinctly flat head-shape; this bird’s head is round.  This is a medium sized grackle; at just a couple inches longer than the Common Grackle.

A large, long-tailed blackbird, the Boat-tailed Grackle
is found exclusively along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts
of the United States.

The noisy, iridescent, purple-black male has a bluish sheen visible on the head, in good light, and grading to greenish on the body. The extroverted bird is hard to miss when it displays on power lines and telephone poles.  Young males are black but lack the adult's iridescence.  The smaller, brown female has a shorter tail and reddish brown plumage overall, darkest on wings and tail. She is quite beautiful but is much less conspicuous and might even be mistaken for a different species.  Young females resemble pale adult females, with spots on the breast.

Boat-tailed Grackle, eating shrimp.

 General Description:

• Iridescent black body, usually more blue-green
• Larger, longer tail; held in deep ‘V’ during display flights
• Very large, long bill
• Yellow to brown eye color, depending on range/subspecies

Measurements: Both Sexes

Length

10.2–14.6 in
26–37 cm

Wingspan

15.4–19.7 in
39–50 cm

Weight

3.3–8.4 oz
93–239 g

A US native and endemic only here, this grackle is resident along Atlantic coast from Long Island and New Jersey south, throughout peninsular Florida, and west along Gulf coast to southeastern Texas.  Boat-tailed Grackles have established significant populations in several United States Gulf Coast cities and towns where they can be found foraging in trash bins, dumpsters and parking lots.

Courtship: The courtship antics of this race are similar to those described for the eastern form (see p. 366). A great variety of locations may be used by the displaying or singing bird; E. A. Mellienny, (1937), writing about the bird in Louisiana, gives a clear picture of such proceedings as follows:

Their favorite station for plumage exhibition is the top of a small bush or low tree. If these are not available, they will alight on the ground or on a muskrat house or pile of debris. Here they stay quietly for some minutes, with their feathers compressed and beak and neck pointing skyward, then suddenly one of them will give a series of squeaking, chuckling, raucous cries, during which all the feathers are fluffed, tail spread, wings half opened and vibrated rapidly, making a loud, rattling sound [see Voice]. The others of the group immediately follow the leader's example, and for a minute or two each individual is animated and noisy, only to drop back to the compressed statue like pose. This noisy exhibition takes place either while at rest or on the wing.

If, over such a group of males, flies a female seeking a mate, all of the males at once take flight on loudly flapping wings and with rattling quills, squeaking and calling in their most seductive manner, begin chasing her. Should none of this group of males attract her, she quickly out flies them and proceeds to look over other groups until she finds her choice. When a mate is selected she flies in front of and near him, leading him off to one side, until the other males in the group drop out of the chase. The pair then alights on the ground and mating is accomplished.

These Grackles generally nest near or over water, in willows, cattails, saw grass, bulrushes or up to 80’ high in trees.  The nest is a well-concealed cup in trees or shrubs; where three to five eggs are laid.

Boat-tailed Grackle eats various invertebrates, grain, some small vertebrates; forages on ground, mudflats, and in shallow water.  They are omnivorous, eating insects, minnows, frogs, eggs, berries, seeds and grain, even small birds. Larger injured birds are taken by the Boat-tailed Grackle when opportunity offers; sandpipers, heron,egret and more. They will steal food from other birds…or from pet-food bowls.

During the spring and summer the food consists largely of a wide range of aquatic life: fish, frogs, insects, crustacea, and spiders. The boat-tail's ability as a fisherman is considerable, and it is often to be seen wading in pools or marshy creeks, up to its belly, making accurate stabs of the beak at minnows of various sorts. In some of these maneuvers it immerses the entire head, in others it hovers like a petrel. The boat-tail seems very fond of the crayfish, and often searches this creature out on its own; but, as related under "Behavior," it sometimes seizes them from other birds, notably the eastern glossy ibis and probably some of the herons. The bird is quite good as a flycatcher, and secures various insects on the wing with apparent ease

This bird's song is a harsh jeeb, and it has a variety of typically grackle-like chatters and squeaks, and the characteristic rolling or rattling sound; often accompanied by a wing-flutter, as shown here.

Cool Facts

• Eye color in the Boat-tailed Grackle varies from region to region. Grackles along the Atlantic coast north of Florida have straw-colored eyes. Florida birds have dark eyes. Grackles west of Florida to eastern Louisiana have light eyes, but those further west have dark ones.
• Fledglings that fall into the water can swim well for short distances, using their wings as paddles.
• The Boat-tailed Grackle has an odd mating system: harem polygyny or female defense polygyny. Females cluster their nests, and the males compete to defend the entire colony and mate there. The most dominant male gets most of the copulations in a system similar to that used by many deer. But all is not as simple as it seems. Although the dominant male may get up to 87% of the copulations at a colony, DNA fingerprinting shows that he actually sires only about 25% of the young in the colony. Most of the young are fathered by non-colony males away from the colonies.

Sound:  Click Here to listen

Sources:

·         Wikipedia

·         Cornell’s All About Birds

·         Birds by Bent

·         The Crossley Guide – Eastern Birds

·         Kaufman Focus Guide – Birds of North America

·         Smithsonian Field Guide to Birds of North America

·         Stokes Field Guide to Birds of North America

Photos:

·         Wikipedia

·         YouTube

Great-tailed Grackle - Quiscalus mexicanus

These grackles have moved to the United States from Mexico. Their range is the southern states from California to Florida, however, they are slowly moving more to the north. They prefer areas with a source of water and trees to nest in such as agricultural areas, mangrove areas and urban or suburban areas. They may migrate for the winter from northern areas, but are permanent residents in southern areas.

The Great-tailed Grackle, or Mexican Grackle, was historically almost exclusively found in Central and South America, but human alteration of the environment has caused the birds to expand their range to include parts of the United States. Their current range in the United States is north to eastern Oregon, with individuals sighted as far north as Canada, south to northwest Peru, and northwest Venezuela in the south; the grackle's range has been expanding north and west in recent years. It is common in Texas and Arizona in the southern regions and as far east as Western Arkansas.

Great-tailed and Boat-tailed species are primarily resident in their ranges, but have been undergoing dramatic

range expansion northward during the twentieth century. Populations of Boat-tailed and Great-tailed grackles in northern, recently-colonized areas, move southward during winter months.  This animated chart shows this northern movement over the last 100 years: 
http://birds.audubon.org/sites/default/files/photos/grackleanimatedmaps.gif

Our biggest grackle; this big, brash blackbird, the male Great-tailed Grackle shimmers in iridescent black and purple, and trails a tail that will make you look twice. The rich brown females are about half the male’s size. Flocks of these long-legged, social birds strut and hop on suburban lawns, golf courses, fields, and marshes in Texas, the Southwest, and southern Great Plains. In the evening, raucous flocks pack neighborhood trees, filling the sky with their amazing (some might say ear-splitting) voices.

This huge blackbird is hard to ignore due to its boisterous nature.  Long, deeply keeled tail; large, thick bill, with nearly straight culmen; flat crown, shallow forehead and the adult male is entirely black with obvious violet-blue iridescence. Eyes yellow; bill and legs black. Adult female: smaller than male and doesn’t have the keeled tail. She is brown above with dull iridescence on wings and tail; buffy on head and below, becoming darker brown on belly and vent; eyes are yellow and the dark lateral throat stripes usually obvious. Immature male: smaller than the adult male, with shorter tail, dull iridescence, browner wings, and frequently dark eyes. Juvenile: like female, but paler and shows diffuse streaking below.

 Great-tailed Grackles - females

Eight great-tailed grackle subspecies are recognized, but only 3 are found in North America. These northern subspecies are prosopidicola, found in the east of the great-tailed's range west to central Texas; monsoni, found from central Arizona east to western Texas; and nelsoni, found in California and western Arizona. All 3 subspecies of the great-tailed are spreading northward in the United States. For the most part, there is little information regarding which subspecies have spread to which areas; therefore the range descriptions given above are tentative. And some intergradation may be occurring now that these subspecies are coming widely into contact.

• Bright yellow eyes
• Iridescent black body, usually more blue-purple
• Larger, longer tail; held in deep ‘V’ during display flights
• Very large, long bill; nearly as long as head

Size & Shape

The Great-Tailed Grackle has a disproportionately
 small, slightly rounded head on a neck that’s thin in relation to its large body.  Males are long-legged, slender blackbirds with a somewhat flat-headed profile and stout, straight bills. The male’s tapered tail is nearly as long as its body and folds into a distinctive V or keel shape. Females are about half the size of males with long, slender tails.  
Male

• Length: 18.1 in
• Wingspan: 22.8 in
• Weight: 6.7 oz

Female

• Length: 15 in
• Wingspan: 18.9 in
• Weight: 3.7 oz

Relative Size 

• Exceptionally long-tailed and large songbird. Much smaller by weight than an American Crow, but about the same length.

Color Pattern

• Male Great-tailed Grackles are iridescent black with piercing yellow eyes, and black bills and legs. 
• Females are dark brown above, paler below, with a buff-colored throat and stripe above the eye. 
• Juveniles have the female’s dark brown plumage, with streaked under parts and a dark eye.

Great-tailed Grackles eat mostly various invertebrates, sometimes small fishes, frogs, tadpoles, snails, crayfish, lizards, small snakes, bird eggs and nestlings, also grain; forages on ground, mud flats, and in shallow water. It eats berries and larger fruits, newly planted and ripening grain, waste grain, seeds, fruits, berries, and nuts and larvae extracted from ground, ticks removed from cattle, various invertebrates and small vertebrates, carrion, offal; in fact these birds will forage nearly anywhere, from the ground, in shrubs and trees, and even by wading in shallow water.  However, the majority of foraging is done on the ground.

Favored habitat includes partly open situations with scattered trees, cultivated lands, pastures, shores of watercourses, swamps, wet thickets, around human habitation, sometimes in marshes. Often roosts in village shade trees or urban parks. South America: common locally in mangroves and along shorelines and on lawns and in parks in towns and. Nests in trees, bushes, man-made structures, mostly near or over water; marsh vegetation where no trees or bushes are available near water. Sometimes nests in heron colony.

Short, but sweet little clip

Cool Facts

• In winter, enormous flocks of both male and female Great-tailed Grackles gather in “roost trees.” These winter roosts can contain thousands of individuals, with flocks of up to half a million occurring in sugarcane fields in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.
• In 1900 the northern edge of the Great-tailed Grackle’s range barely reached southern Texas. Since the 1960s they’ve followed the spread of irrigated agriculture and urban development into the Great Plains and West, and today are one of North America’s fastest-expanding species.
• The Great-tailed and Boat-tailed grackles have at times been considered the same species. Current thinking is that they are closely related, but different species.  They do hybridize.
• Because they’re smaller and require less food, female Great-tailed Grackle chicks are more likely than their brothers to survive to fledgling. Likewise, adult females may outlive males, resulting in a “sex-biased” population with greater numbers of females than males.
• Although you’ll usually see them feeding on land, Great-tailed Grackles may also wade into the water to grab a frog or fish.
• Great-tailed Grackles—especially females—learn to recognize individual researchers working in their breeding colonies, and will react with a chut alarm call when they see the researcher, even away from the nesting site.

According to Birdzilla.com, an unusual trick for a blackbird, the Great-tailed Grackle can plunge-dive to catch small fish in the same way terns are commonly seen foraging.

A fine little slideshow of several many photos of
the life of a Boat-tailed Grackle

Call

• Low chut; males may give a louder clack.  This bird has a large variety of raucous, cacophonous calls.   
• Song is a strange mix of slurred whistles and electrical static-type sounds, usually ending in a staccato, mechanical rattle; call is a soft tchut.  The male Great-tailed Grackle's horribly loud "song" is a series of harsh rattles, squeaks like that of styrofoam rubbing together, whistles, sounds like the tuning of an old radio, and gravelly "Check!" calls.  You can hear three here: 
  •   One
  •   Two
  •   Three

Sources:

• Wikipedia
• Cornell’s All About Birds
• The Crossley Guide – Eastern Birds
• Kaufman Focus Guide – Birds of North America
• Smithsonian Field Guide to Birds of North America
• Stokes Field Guide to Birds of North America

Photos:

• Wikipedia
• YouTube

Common Grackle - Quiscalus quiscula

Common Grackles, or Crow Blackbirds as they are sometimes called, are blackbirds that look like they've been slightly stretched. They very common almost everywhere east of the Rockies Longer than most blackbirds, slimmer than most crows, Common Grackle males are very iridescent and have long tails with a distinct crease down the center. Generally, their heads, necks and breasts are glossy purplish-blue or bluish-green. However, common grackles in different parts of North America have somewhat different colored plumage.

In New England and in the West, the subspecies has a brassy bronze body coloration. Often called the Bronzed Grackle: it has a black head with blue-green iridescence. Sharply defined bronze back. Long, black tail with purplish iridescence. Called the Purple Grackle, this one has a black head, back, and sides with purple iridescence. May have iridescent barring on the back. Long, black tail with possible blue-green iridescence. Tail displays a longitudinal ridge or keel when in flight. Pale yellow eyes, though not always. Found from central Louisiana and Alabama north to southern New York and Connecticut, west of the Appalachian Mountains and in New England. East of the Allegheny Mountains, the body is purple, and in the southeast the feathers have a greenish hue.

Females are not as iridescent or as colorful, and their tails are not as distinctive, nor do they keel their tails much.
The iridescence of the head is different from that of the body, and changes abruptly behind the neck and breast; this applies to all forms of common grackle. The central feathers of the long, rounded tail are often depressed, so that the tail is displayed in flight with a deeply keeled V-shape, especially with breeding males in flight. Common Grackles taller, with long, strong legs and longer tailed than a typical blackbird, with a longer, and more tapered bill; bill and legs are black.

Grackles walk around lawns and fields on their long legs or gather in noisy groups high in trees, typically evergreens. They eat many crops (notably corn) and nearly anything else as well, including garbage. In flight their long tails trail behind them, sometimes folded down the middle into a shallow V shape, especially during breeding time. The adult female, beyond being smaller, is usually less iridescent; her tail in particular is shorter, and unlike the males, does not keel in flight. The juvenile is brown with dark brown eyes and faintly streaked on breast. These are one of the earliest passerine migrants in spring.

Common Grackles are large, lanky blackbirds with long legs and long tails. The head is flat and the bill is longer than in most blackbirds, with the hint of a downward curve. In flight, the wings appear short in comparison to the tail. Males are slightly larger than females.

Sized for Both Sexes:

• Length: 11–13.4 inches
• Wingspan: 14.2–18.1 inches
• Weight: 2.6–5 ounces
• Relative Size: Larger than a Red-winged Blackbird; about the same size as a Mourning Dove, though its long tail makes it appear larger.

Color Pattern
Common Grackles appear black from a distance, but up close their glossy purple heads contrast with bronzy-iridescent bodies. A bright golden eye gives grackles an intent expression. Females are slightly less glossy than males. Young birds are dark brown with a dark eye. As you know, there are many Leucistic birds; this is a Leucistic Common Grackle, below. Click the tag 'Leucistic' (at the end of this article) for more information.

Their diet consists of a wide variety of animal and vegetable food, including insects and invertebrates but also insects, crustaceans, earthworms, frogs, and small rodents and occasional eggs and nestlings. In rare instances, Common Grackles will attack and eat small birds and lizards, and in coastal areas they forage at the tide line for small invertebrates, even wading into the water to capture live fish. During the winter and migration months, their diet shifts to plant food, such as seeds and waste grain. Because of their predilection for agricultural grain and seeds, especially corn, Common Grackles have earned a reputation as a significant pest in certain areas of North America. The omnivorous grackles feed in farm fields, pastures, and suburban lawns by walking, rather than hopping, and they act aggressively toward, even stealing food from, other ground-foraging birds such as robins.
 
Sharp-shinned Hawks, Great Horned Owls and Red-tailed Eagles are predators of Grackles, not to forget predators of all birds; cats and dogs, skunks, raccoons, snakes and people.
 

Call 

The Lone Pine Field Guide to Birds describes the Common Grackle as a "poor but spirited singer who, despite his lack of musical talent, remains smug and proud, posing with his bill held high". Their call is a loud chuck, while their song is short creaky koguba-leek. Call: a loud and deep chuck. Song: a mechanical, squeaky readle-eak. Variety of whistles, clucks, and hissing notes. Both sexes sing.

• USGS
• Xeno-canto  

Cool Facts

• Those raggedy figures out in cornfields may be called scare-crows, but grackles are the #1 threat to corn. They eat ripening corn as well as corn sprouts, and their habit of foraging in big flocks means they have a multimillion dollar impact. Some people have tried to reduce their effects by spraying a foul-tasting chemical on corn sprouts or by culling grackles at
  their roosts.
• Common Grackles are resourceful foragers. They sometimes follow plows to catch invertebrates and mice, wade into water to catch small fish, pick leeches off the legs of turtles, steal worms from American Robins, raid nests, and kill and eat
  adult birds.
• Grackles have a hard keel on the inside of the upper mandible that they use for sawing open acorns. Typically they score the outside of the narrow end, then bite the acorn open.
• You might see a Common Grackle hunched over on the ground, wings spread, letting ants crawl over its body and feathers. This is called ‘anting’, and grackles are frequent practitioners among the many bird species that do it. The ants secrete formic acid, the chemical in their stings, and this may rid the bird of parasites. In addition to ants, grackles have been seen using walnut juice, lemons and limes, marigold blossoms, chokecherries and mothballs in a similar fashion.
• In winter, Common Grackles forage and roost in large communal flocks with several different species of blackbird. Sometimes these flocks can number in the millions of individuals.
• Rarely, Common Grackles nest in places other than their usual treetops, including birdhouses, old woodpecker holes, barns, and in still-occupied nests of Osprey and Great Blue Heron.
• The oldest recorded Common Grackle was 22 years 11 months old.

The Common Grackle builds nests of twigs, grass, hay, sometimes cemented with mud lined with fine grass between six and sixty feet high on branches preferably in coniferous trees, although not picky and sometimes in tree hollows and abandoned cavities, often near or over water. Sometimes they nest in numbers in the same tree for safety and sometimes even nest in a small opening in the lower parts of an Osprey's nest of sticks.

• 
  One smart Grackle!
  
  Watch this one problem solve.
  
  
  Where are Common Grackles found and how are they moving?

(Darker red showsa greater concentration of these birds.)

• Sources:

  • Wikipedia
  • Cornell’s All About Birds
  • The Crossley Guide – Eastern Birds
  • Kaufman Focus Guide – Birds of North America
  • Smithsonian Field Guide to Birds of North America
  • Stokes Field Guide to Birds of North America

  Photos:

  • Wikipedia
  • YouTube

Grackles

Grackle is the common name of any of eleven (usually) black passerine birds native to North and South America. All are members of the Icterid family but belong to multiple genera. The members of the Genus Quiscalus found in the North America; three in Colorado and one, the Boat-tailed Grackle, is found usually only along the coasts of southeastern Texas to Florida, around and more than half-way up the Atlantic East coast. It is found in coastal saltwater marshes, and, in Florida, also on inland waters. In that all grackles seem to be moving northward, it is no longer extraordinarily rare to find the Boat-tailed Grackle also in Colorado. These three grackles are:

• Boat-tailed Grackle, Quiscalus major
• Common Grackle, Quiscalus quiscula
• Great-tailed Grackle, Quiscalus mexicanus

The Icterids are a group of small to medium-sized, often colorful passerine birds restricted to the New World. Most species have black as a predominant plumage color, often enlivened by yellow, orange or red. This group includes the New World blackbirds, New World orioles, the Bobolink, meadowlarks, grackles, and cowbirds. A passerine is a bird of the order Passeriformes, which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds or, less accurately, as songbirds

The best way to separate Common Grackles from blackbirds and cowbirds is by size and shape: Common Grackles are larger, lankier, longer tailed, and longer billed. Common Grackles have a widened tail, often held in a V-shape, even in flight. Great-tailed Grackles of the Southwest and south Texas, and Boat-tailed Grackles of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, are even larger, and the males have much larger and more deeply keeled tails. The Great-tailed Grackle is the largest of our grackles, by several inches; while lighter in body-weight, they are about the same length as an American Crow.

Boat-tailed Grackles overlap with Great-tailed Grackles only in coastal Texas and Louisiana. They live mainly in coastal salt marshes, rarely moving inland (except in Florida where they are widespread across the peninsula). Boat-tailed Grackles, only slightly larger than the Common Grackle, have a much more rounded head, whereas Great-tailed Grackles have a sloping, flat crown.

Grackles tend to congregate in large groups, such a group is called: a plague of grackles.


A Plague of Grackes; likely with other black birds
like starlings and Red-Winged Blackbirds.
I like these big guys; probably because I don't get anywhere near that many! I should be thankful I've never had many more than about 100 mixed 'black birds' in my yard at a single time! But because I am intrigued by these Grackles (and used to confuse Great-tailed with the much smaller Boat-tailed Grackles), I intend to follow this post with a 3-part piece on the Grackles I might actually see here in Colorado. I hope you enjoy...and leave a comment; I love 'em. Again, if you click a label you'll find other postings & photos of a similar nature.

Sources:

• Wikipedia
• Cornell’s All About Birds
• The Crossley Guide – Eastern Birds
• Kaufman Focus Guide – Birds of North America
• Smithsonian Field Guide to Birds of North America
• Stokes Field Guide to Birds of North America

Photos:

• Wikipedia
• YouTube

Another New Yard Bird!

No, not a movie set, just a bunch o' black birds enjoying the corn I put out for them. And the number of Yellow-headed Blackbirds is increasing!

I had a lovely day capturing the Yellow Headed Blackbirds…digitally, of course.

They are such flashy birds, bigger than the other blackbirds by almost an inch in length, two inches in wingspan and a half an ounce heavier…quite a bit for a songbird; nearly as big as a Grackle.

The Yellow-heads have a large white-patch, primary coverts, which one doesn’t see when they are eating. It's awesome to see when they posture like the picture here.

Red-wings, Great-tailed and Common Grackles, Yellow-heads and yet another bird, often flock together. I must say, they make a stunning group; quite colorful.

For awhile I was confusing the Common Grackles with that smaller bird that, in my untrained mind at least, has similar markings and I’d not yet figured out it was a lot smaller. Both have a dark bodies and a contrasting color on the head; but where the Grackles have glossy-dark bodies with a, blue head…this bird has a glossy-dark body and a brown head. I knew I was seeing something different, but I’d seen this ‘different bird’ only once or twice and never long enough to run down field notes in my head. But I finally found it in a photo of other birds in my yard. It’s a stocky thing and much smaller than the Blackbirds.

To be honest, adding another bird to my Backyard List is fun…I just sort of wish it wasn’t a Brown Headed Cowbird! Do you see it? [shudder]

Parasites, they are; Obligate brood parasites to be specific. The thing is, the Cowbird evolved following buffalo around on the Great Plains. When the great herds moved on, so did the Cowbird; it didn’t have the time to sit on a nest so it evolved a handy little trick…depositing its eggs in another bird’s nest and letting that bird raise the young. Clever, but disgusting by our standards, and sad to watch when a small host-parent tries valiantly to keep the freakishly-large hatchling fed. Cowbird nestlings usually hatch at least a day earlier then its adopted siblings and are generally 3-4 times larger as well…often making it the only nestling to survive. Click here for more information. The sad thing is that while the buffalo have dissappeard, this bird has not...nor it's bad habbits.

I’m sad to see this particular bird in

my yard; the thing even looks evil.

Evil incarnate...it’s a Brown-headed Cowbird!

[update] Make that a dozen or more in my yard! ...sigh

Oh, What a Wonderful Morning

What an exciting morning I’ve had. I was busy doing household chores when I realized the birds had gotten quiet. As I have discovered the reason often lies high in the trees, I looked up: yup, a shadow…very high up in the Cottonwoods. Now, I generally wander around my house sans the glasses that I need to watch television or to drive…I don’t need them for close-up work, after all. However birding, when one can’t see things at a distance, is iffy at best…all I knew was that I was looking at a very large bird. I was thinking Golden Eagle or Great Horned Owl, both frequent this area.

But no, looking through my little binoculars, I realize the bird is neither an owl, nor an eagle…but it was much larger than the little Sharp-shinned Hawks I’ve seen in my yard. These fast, little Accipiter hunt regularly in my yard; I’ve been startled by the rapid blur, moving just a few feet off the ground, racing through my yard and around the corner of the house; clearly chasing a bird that had been at my feeders. I don’t mind this at all; hawks have to eat too.

The bird I watched in the tree this morning was even larger than the Red-Tailed Hawk I watched rise up off my lawn yesterday, after hearing a rapid ‘thump, thump, thump’ on the window…something I just don’t hear since draping the windows with bird netting that moves in the breeze. While I didn’t see what was in its grasp, it clearly had a successful strike and likely had either an Eurasian Dove (they feed here, two to three dozen at a time), a Red-Winged Blackbird or one of the Grackles that hangs with them; they all feed on the corn I toss for them. They come in great numbers, I’ve counted close to fifty on the ground at one time…I’ve also found feathers in nearly the same place I watched this Hawk fly up in my direction, distinctive red-tail what I noticed most.

Buteos like to hunt from the big trees around my yard, I’ve watched one in the tree where I watched this bird, but this bird was larger yet, though it had what looked to be the short, fast wings of the Buteo. I studied this big bird, noting it had a grayish head and darker back; yet the throat and breast were quite light. The tail was not at all red and there was little to no streaking on the breast, either. For that reason I checked to make sure I was not looking at an Osprey, which I’ve seen in this area though closer to open water. No, no funny little cow-lick at the back of the head, nor that dark eye-mark Ospreys show. Finally I looked away and grabbed my Sibley Field Guide; I was watching the first Swainson's Hawk I’ve ever identified. I’m so tickled with myself. LOL (I also crack myself up...for the longest time I insisted it was a Ferruginous Hawk, which clearly it is not!)

Finally I took a chance to go outside and try for a photograph. I’ve decided my 7-year old digital camera (Canon PowerShot G3), telephoto lens or no, is just not equipped to handle subjects at such a distance…and the height where this bird was sitting increased the distance a good deal. Of course, then there is the fact that I’m trying, blindly, to learn how to use the camera to my advantage. I don’t want to always leave it on automatic…but maybe I should. So many of my shots turn out so badly, it’s disappointing, to say the least. And I want a spotting scope, too!

I have been studying a marvelous little book, Finding Your Wings: A Workbook for Beginning Bird Watchers, by Burton Guttman. The book teaches the way I learn. It includes information regarding how to look at birds and offers activities and quizzes that help learn what to look for when watching them. Probably the best thing I’ve learned so far is to study the field guides before I go out to find birds; study silhouettes, learn to look at beaks and recognize size and shape as a clue to the kind of bird you might be watching, learn to note wing and tail shapes and finally particular markings or colors the bird exhibits. Also studying how a bird lives, how and where it moves and when it might be in an area in a particular season.

Having done my homework, I also think I got another first-bird while watching the hawk. An unusual flash of color pulled my eye higher up the tree where I spied a small bird alone in the treetop. I could not clearly make it out other than to note the color that drew me to it; a red head and bright yellow breast. My first Tanager? This would be their breeding season, they do come through this part of the country about now and they like high tree-tops. What other bird could this be but a Western Tanager, all by itself in my little woods?

Yes, it was a beautiful day. I even got a better shot of that Yellow-headed Blackbird! (such as it was through the window). I'll get better ...I mean it, too.