Bird of the week: Boat-tailed grackle

With striking iridescent black feathers, a penetrating brown-eyed stare and harsh, repeated calls, male boat-tailed grackles are easy to spot along our freshwater and brackish marshes.  Females, less showy with dark brown plumage above and russet below, and smaller, are not as conspicuous.  They are also not as loud: Though both males and females sing, females rarely do so.

Longer and lankier than your average songbird, grackles are sometimes mistaken for crows.  Their slender build and narrower bill will help you tell the two species apart.  In flight, boat-tailed grackle tail feathers form a V shape, like the keel of a boat, hence their name.  These boisterous blackbirds are omnivores, feeding on everything from seeds and human-food scraps to crustaceans scavenged from the shoreline. 

Although boat-tailed grackles have adapted to urban habitats in Florida, they are by nature marsh birds.  They nest in large, noisy colonies, in the tangles of upright tall, reedy aquatic plants of marsh vegetation and mangroves.  Though their populations are generally stable, they do face a threat from declining habitat due to development and climate change.

Indeed, Audubon’s Birds and Climate Change Report, a comprehensive study that analyzed decades of bird sighting data, projects a 95%  loss of current breeding range for boat-tailed grackles and a 93% decrease in climatically suitable areas.  In other words, with climate change, their current essential habitats will practically disappear, suggesting that grackles, and many other bird species, may need direct human intervention and support to survive into the 22nd century.