Blackbirds: Four and twenty tests of birder’s skills

If you want to test your powers of observation, try watching a flock of about 1,000 red-winged blackbirds flapping over a marsh — all of them shouting their lungs out keeping in contact with one another.

Pick out about a dozen tri-colored blackbirds. Difficult? You bet. But Paul Sullivan, a pretty darn good birder, did just that while out counting raptors a few weeks back.

Paul Sullivan and Carol Karlen sent an e-mail message out to Oregon birders via OBOL (Oregon Birders on Line) informing us birders that they had been out counting birds over in Gilliam County and spotted a large flock of red-winged blackbirds in the northern end of the county northeast of Condon. In among the red-wings they saw about 10 of the tri-colored variety. What will usually catch a birder’s eye is white below red on the epaulet.

Both red-winged and tri-colored blackbirds are adorned with a red patch on the epaulets, but on the red-winged, there is a border of yellow — while on the tri-colored it’s white. Other than that, it is virtually impossible (for me) to tell them apart.

Oh, sure there is a slight difference between the red of the feathers on epaulets of the two birds. The red-winged has a slightly purple tint to the red, while the tri-colored is a bright red. However, an old color-blind birder like me always has trouble seeing those subtle differences. The calls of the two birds are a little different as well, but then again, if you are hard-of-hearing, oh well… You just have to be on your toes, like Paul and Carol.

(Thanks to my new Siemens hearing instruments, I heard red-wings in my yard the other day, and on a birding trip to Camp Polk Preserve I heard the females — the first ones I’ve been able to hear in over 20 years!)

One thing you will not have confusion about is the scientific names of both species. The red-winged is Agelaius phoeniceu, which, roughly translated, means “belonging to a flock possessing purplish red.” The tri-colored bunch are in the same genus, Agelaius, which is appropriate, as both species travel and nest in large flocks, but the species name, tricolor, speaks for itself: black (body and wings), red and white (epaulets).

In tri-colored blackbirds, the black is very black, the red is very red and the white is very white, especially during breeding season.

Like male hummingbirds, male blackbirds are also polygamous — if that’s the correct term to use for birds. To me, “polygamous” means having more than one wife, and as far as I know, no one has ever “married” a male blackbird to a female blackbird. Nevertheless, male blackbirds tend to settle down in a marsh with eight to ten females in a group and then defend their nesting territory.

Blackbirds have to live with the threat of crows, ravens, magpies, skunks, weasels, stray housecats, and intrusive people. Anyone who has been insensitive enough to wander into a red-wing or tri-colored blackbird’s territory knows just how diligent the male and female can be at protecting house and home.

And so did the poor maid…

“Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie....

“The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes, When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!”

No exaggeration in that last line; I have seen red-winged blackbirds ride on the backs of marauding ravens over at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during nesting time. Sometimes it almost works, but while dad is riding the raven out of town, wise old momma raven is plundering the blackbird’s nest. Such are the checks-and-balances of Nature.