Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Red Winged Blackbird
By: Tom Berg
One of the most common birds found along our lakeshores and wetland areas in the summertime is the red-winged blackbird. These familiar birds prefer to nest in wet and swampy areas filled with cattails, marsh grass and other wetland vegetation, and the male birds defend their nesting territory enthusiastically. They even attack humans if they get too close to their nest.
Male red-winged blackbirds are easy to identify. During the breeding season they are a glossy jet-black color, with a bright red and yellow shoulder patch on each wing. Females are a drab brown color with tan streaking to help camouflage them as they sit on their nests in the dense vegetation. Females also have a faint touch of orange on their shoulders which helps people recognize them. Later in the year, the males are a dirtier black color and they lose much of the red coloration on their shoulders.
Red-winged blackbirds are like many species in the animal kingdom, where the males have many female mates. Some males breed with two or more females, while more dominant males might have more than 14 different female mates. This behavior is somewhat unusual in birds, however, since many bird species mate with just one partner for life.
During the spring and summer, red-winged blackbirds prefer to feed on the ground where they scratch and search for a variety of insects. In the fall and winter, the blackbirds continue feeding on the ground, but since most of the insects are gone during the cold weather months, their diet switches to mostly grains and seeds.
As summer turns to fall, large flocks of red-winged blackbirds gather with other blackbird species (grackles, starlings, cowbirds and others). They form giant super-flocks, often numbering in the tens-of-thousands, and sometimes numbering in the millions of birds. These huge flocks of blackbirds roost within the sanctuary of wetlands as they migrate. Most of our red-winged blackbirds spend the winter in the southern United States and parts of Mexico, but they will be back with their distinctive call next spring.
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