#grackles

[mega-angry-cloud]

Grackle 👏🏾 with 👏🏾 CHIP!!!!!👏🏾

Grackle with Chip

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[manuscriptsdontburn6]

the scientific name for the grackle is gracula quiscula so now next time i see a grackle i will call it count gracula

[ostdrossel]

It's Puff Grack season! I love the Grackles, and about a week after their arrival they have started to show off. Please enjoy the Grack Waltz! (Unmute for max fun!)

[simplified-birds]

Simplified bird #100 - great-tailed grackle

( requested by @birdadjacent )

[geopsych]

12 years ago today I took this picture on a short walk from my house with a really cheap camera, and for the first time it occurred to me that you don’t have to go to some exotic place or have an expensive SLR camera with lots of lenses in order to take beautiful pictures. Just show up somewhere while the world is being beautiful and do the best you can. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

[great-and-small]

Very impressed with this clever grackle snatching a minnow right out of the creek. Watching birds hunt always makes me feel like an early cretaceous naturalist observing a Utahraptor outsmart its prey.

[blarplesnoot]

Caught mid-grackle!

It's finally warming up and the massive flocks of grackles are returning to my home state of CT.

Many don't know, but they're an introduced species that flourished in the states, and now unfortunately outcompetes many native species.

^ this is wrong and I apologize. The Great Tailed Grackle is the introduced and invasive one. This image is a common Grackle! Thanks to the commenter for the catch :)

They're still cute when they call though 🥰 I took this picture at the Forest Park Zoo in Springfield. Check it out it's a great little zoo!

[rraaaarrl]

i always see people talking about crows and ravans but what of this silly guy, the great-tailed grackle. he traipses into our yard with his squawks and robotic-sounding squeaks and floofs up his vaguely iridescent plumaeg and then

for whatever reasons they enjoy emitting a squawk and looking up this is very important.

[rjzimmerman]

I'm going to invite these scientists to our house and yard. We have dozens and dozens of grackles at our feeders, making their grackle noises and bullying away our other "resident" birds. But in case they're right, here's an excerpt from an Audubon story:

As people have remade the American landscape, they’ve also shaped the fortunes of Common Grackles. The iridescent blackbirds flourished in the grain fields and pastures that European settlers cultivated after cutting down forests in the 18th and 19th centuries. By the 1970s, an estimated 150 million grackles inhabited a vast stretch from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains, and today they are regulars across much of the continent. But the birds are disappearing—and no one knows why. A new tracking project aims to reveal what’s driving the mysterious decline.

Birders were among the first to gather evidence of the species’ troubling trajectory. In winter, grackles join Red-winged Blackbirds, European Starlings, and other birds in giant swirling congregations. Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC) long tallied roosts of up to tens of millions of birds. But in the past couple of decades, participants have rarely found flocks of more than a few million, says former CBC director Geoff LeBaron. Other blackbirds are in decline, too, but grackles have become noticeably absent from winter roosts.

According to CBC data, Common Grackles have been dropping at a rate of 3 percent per year, which amounts to a roughly 78 percent decline since 1970, says Tim Meehan, a quantitative scientist at Audubon. Meanwhile, federal Breeding Bird Surveys, which take place each summer, have found at least a 50 percent decline over the past half century. These data clearly indicate that there are fewer grackles across the board, Meehan says: “It’s a slam dunk.”

Michael Ward, a University of Illinois biologist, is one of the lead scientists delving into the conundrum. In 2021 he and his colleagues ruled out a hunch that grackles were failing to produce young: 60 percent of chicks in nearly 200 nests that he monitored fledged successfully, a higher rate than most songbirds achieve. Whatever is harming grackles is likely affecting adults, Ward says.

It’s possible the resourceful foragers, which eat everything from grubs to grains to garbage, are exposed to something dangerous in their diet. The researchers suspect insects and corn could be hazardous meals: Both may contain high levels of neonicotinoids—insecticides commonly applied to grains that have been linked to a decline in avian biodiversity in North America and beyond. Ward’s group plans to study what grackles eat on their breeding grounds to help determine how great a risk their food poses.

Meanwhile, the scientists want to better understand the challenges grackles face after leaving their breeding grounds. In addition to stringing up mist nets to snag birds in residential neighborhoods and at roost sites, Ward and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Kelly VanBeek set live traps baited with seed and mealworms at Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance’s Goose Pond Sanctuary. They outfitted 14 Common Grackles with satellite tags throughout the summer and early fall of 2023 as the birds prepared to depart for their wintering grounds in the Southeast and southern Midwest.

On those journeys, VanBeek says, there are plenty of opportunities for the migrants to encounter other possible chemical culprits like fungicides, which may disrupt birds’ hormones and metabolism and are typically applied in the fall when grackles are on the move. Blackbirds’ penchant for foraging on farmland in large flocks makes them a target for culling as well. Between 1974 and 1992, the federal government killed up to 18 million Common Grackles in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama to reduce damage to agricultural crops. The pace has slowed, but the practice continues: Wildlife Services, a USDA division, killed more than 630,000 Common Grackles over the past decade. That’s on top of birds taken by farmers under FWS permits.

[spinus-pinus]

Boat-tailed Grackle Quiscalus major

6/20/2022 Lake Tohopekaliga, Florida

[tilbugs]

male and female great-tailed grackles! (Quiscalus mexicanus) the most reliable place to find them here is the parking lot and surrounding area of a specific cracker barrel

june 10th, 2024

nebraska, US

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[antiqueanimals]

William Pope (British/Canadian, 1811-1902). Crow Blackbird (Common grackle). Watercolour, bodycolour and pen and ink. Dated April 1st, 1835.

Bonhams

[ostdrossel]

Another one for the Grackheads.

They were the highlight on this gloomy day.

[rachelsrandomsphotos]

Female Boat-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus major)

Taken at the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, FL