Roaming around the southwestern United States is a bird that may not be as appreciated as much as it should be: the Great-tailed Grackle. Great-tailed Grackles are medium sized blackbirds with a slender appearance and an impressively long tail. Males have a black base color with iridescent blue and purple sheens. Females have dark brown wings and a dark brown tail with lighter browns on their head and underside. Females also have a lighter colored throat and show some striping on their face. Aside from their physical appearance making them look pretty unique, these birds also set themselves apart with some very interesting vocalizations. Sounding more like a machine or old time-y radio than a bird, Great-tailed Grackles make a variety of whistles, squawks and even a crackling sound that sound extremely non-avian. 

Great-tailed Grackles are year-round residents of the most northern parts of South America, Central America, and Mexico. In the United States, they are found all the way from Southern California as far north as Iowa, and as far east as Louisiana. It’s worth noting that these birds look extremely similar to another species, the Boat-tailed Grackle that lives in the southeastern United States and in some parts of the country has an overlapping range with the great-tailed grackle, making for a difficult identification challenge. These birds used to be combined as one species but were later split into two which is where they still stand taxonomically at the time of this video. It has been typically accepted that eye color could be used to determine the exact species with great tailed grackles having a yellow eye and boat-tailed grackles having a dark eye, but in recent years this has been found to not always be the case. Oftentimes range is actually one of the most definitive ways to make a positive identification.

Great-tailed Grackles have an extremely varied diet consisting of grains, fruits, and other plant matter, as well as many different types of animals ranging from insects to larger vertebrates like frogs, lizards and even small mammals. These birds are also quite common at bird feeders where they will visit in large groups, sometimes pushing away other species with their relatively large size and sheer numbers, much to the chagrin of feeder watchers.

Great-tailed Grackles can be found in open forests, usually somewhere near a water source. They tend to steer clear of extremely dense forests and arid places, but have adapted extremely well to human habitation, for this reason, they can regularly be seen in large numbers around cities, in parks, and near farms where they forage for food, sometimes along with other blackbird species contributing to the creation of massive large. When it gets close to dark in the nonbreeding months, groups of Great-tailed Grackles return to roosting areas where they cause a ruckus with their various noises. These groups can actually number in the 10s or in some cases even hundreds of thousands, so you can only imagine the noises they produce in these groups.

Due to their ability to live alongside humans in a variety of different altered landscapes, Great-tailed Grackles have actually expanded their range. In the 1990s the northern range of this species was southern Texas, but now they inhabit midwestern and western states with a northern range that now incorporates states as far north as Iowa. Much of this expansion has been due to their ability to live around humans and the increase of irrigated agriculture creating just the right environment for them to thrive. This has also helped the species actually increase in number, and bolster their population to around 30 million worldwide, a net increase since the 1960s. Due to their abundance and propensity for eating crops and reputation for being loud and brash around cities and bird feeders, many people view these birds as pests.

My first experience with Great-tailed Grackles was in northern Texas where I saw them around my hotel parking lot. A few years later I saw them again in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas where I got very well acquainted with them. Many feeding stations were inundated with these birds and it seemed like everywhere we went, Great-tailed Grackles were also there, drinking from puddles, making their fascinating noises from high perches, and generally lurking around foraging in lawns and on streets. While some people may think of these birds as a nuisance, to me they are a recognizable species in their native range and an important part of the ambiance in Mexico, Texas, and the rest of the southwestern United States. What do you think of Great-tailed Grackles? Let us know in the comments below, and as always, thanks for watching, we’ll see you next time, on Badgerland birding.