The Uncommon Grackle

I absolutely love feeding birds in my yard as spring comes on. Each dawning day in February and March brings the possibility of a new visitor, be it sparrow (fox, field or chipping!) or grackle. Or anything else. You never know. 

So it was with delight that my eye picked up a different bird strutting, head up, across the lawn where I scatter corn for just such avian VIP's. 

Looking at him, I was cast back to childhood in Richmond, Virginia, where the "purple grackles" really were purple! This is the bird of my youth. The bird on the left, with the purple head. He's walking up to sass the bronzed grackle on the right. 

I remember so clearly the day in 1977 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when I found a grackle who had collided with Hilles Library's windows on the Radcliffe campus. I picked it up and turned it over and over in my hand. Its back was bronzy green, and its head was a bewitching blue! I'd never seen a grackle like this, and indeed it was the "bronzed" or interior morph I held in my hand. I'd grown up with the "purple" morph which inhabits the coastal plain from New York to Louisiana. I took it to the Museum of Comparative Zoology and made a pretty skin of it, and I trust it's still in the collection.

Now that I live in Ohio, all I usually see is bronzed grackles, and I don't see nearly enough of them. Many people don't realize that the "common" grackle is becoming less and less so, at least in the Eastern half of the U.S. In fact, Breeding Bird Surveys show a 32.4% decline in numbers from 1966-1993, and a 15.9% decline from 1984-1993. (This data from Birds of North America, AOU/ACNS). However, populations are moving west at a good rate, and breeding records are increasing in the Southwest, Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana. The decline in the East is suspected to be as a result of control measures. Birds that roost in great flocks are vulnerable to human persecution, especially when they are considered pests. Spraying the flocks with detergent on freezing nights, stripping the birds' feathers of protective oils and causing death from exposure, is just one of humanity's ways of striking back at flocking birds. It matters not that threatened species like rusty blackbirds and charming marsh troubadours like red-winged blackbirds often roost with common grackles; they're all "blackbirds" and they all have to die when a community of humans decides the flocks constitute a nuisance. 

All this flashes through my mind on the rare and welcome occasions when I see grackles at the feeder. I wonder why so many people have an immediate negative response to grackles, and never stop to see their beauty and majesty. They don't see past their darkness to the rainbow iridescence that captivates upon a closer look. 

These grackles are engaged in a bit of dominance display over their sudden windfall of whole and cracked corn.

Bronzed does a song spread, analogous to a red-winged blackbird's, but without red. He emits a harsh "KSHNNNNKCCH!!"

Purple flashes his nictitating membrane because he don't care. Zombie grackle!

I feasted my lens and eyes on this special visitor, enjoying how his purple head shone next to the bronzed grackle's blue cowl

and laughing each time the bronzed grackle tried to intimidate him with a songspread

and only wishing those daffodils were a week farther along when this rare coastal plain visitor happened to strut through the backyard on March 3, 2017.

So the next time you see a grackle, throw him a little corn, and look a little closer. Ask him where he's from--coastal plain or interior? And wish him well on his journey north, and safe harbor in thick pines where he can help build his nest. He'll need all the luck he can get.