Bird Watching Blackbird

One of the most common birds to be observed here in Wallowa County is the Brewer’s blackbird. I took this photo of a male gathering nesting material from our lawn last year. These males are glossy black with a slight tinge of green on their body and nearly purple on their head with bright yellow eyes. The females are brownish-gray with dark eyes.

Brewer’s blackbirds breed from Canada south through California, Arizona and New Mexico. Unlike most birds, they tend to nest in colonies. The males are fearless defenders and will even swoop down and sometimes strike cats and humans. They will also aggressively chase crows and hawks away from their nesting colonies.

In late summer and early fall these blackbirds will join redwings, grackles and starlings in flocks so numerous they can almost blot out the sun when they create black clouds in the sky. They can also do a lot of damage to unharvested grain crops. Except for that, Brewer’s blackbirds are very beneficial around farmyards with their appetite for insects such as grasshoppers and caterpillars. They also like to hand around picnic parks where they can find crumbs from the tables.

So this fall when you see these enormous flocks, they are mostly starlings and the way to tell the blackbirds from the starlings is they have longer tail feathers, while the unpopular starlings have short tails. Apparently, the only qualification to join these uncountable flocks is to be black.

Hence we have the old adage: Birds of a feather flock together.