Boat-tailed Grackle

Boat-tailed Grackle, male

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Boat-tailed Grackle, female, Gulf Coast form

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1. Description
2. Sound
3. Conservation Status
4. Other Names
5. Cool Facts
6. Full detailed species account

A large, long-tailed blackbird, the Boat-tailed Grackle is found exclusively along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the United States. The noisy, iridescent, purple-black male is hard to miss when it displays on power lines and telephone poles. The smaller brown female is much less conspicuous, and might even be mistaken for a different species.

Description

• Large blackbird.
• Long tail.
• Male shiny black, female brown.

• Size: 26-37 cm (10-15 in)
• Wingspan: 39-50 cm (15-20 in)
• Weight: 93-239 g (3.28-8.44 ounces)

Sex Differences

Male iridescent black. Female dull brown and significantly smaller.

Sound

Song a variable series of sharp notes and harsh guttural trills. Calls sharp "chek" notes and whistles.

Conservation Status

Common; numbers stable.

Other Names

Quiscale des marais (French)
Tordo cola ancha (Spanish)

Cool Facts

• Eye color in the Boat-tailed Grackle varies from region to region. Grackles along the Atlantic coast north of Florida have straw-colored eyes. Florida birds have dark eyes. Grackles west of Florida to eastern Louisiana have light eyes, but those further west have dark ones.

• Fledglings that fall into the water can swim well for short distances, using their wings as paddles.

• The Boat-tailed Grackle has an odd mating system: harem defense polygyny. Females cluster their nests, and the males compete to defend the entire colony and mate there. The most dominant male gets most of the copulations in a system similar to that used by many deer. But all is not as simple as it seems. Although the dominant male may get up to 87% of the copulations at a colony, DNA fingerprinting shows that he actually sires only about 25% of the young in the colony. Most of the young are fathered by noncolony males away from the colonies.

Sources used to construct this page:

Post, W., J. P. Poston, and G. T. Bancroft. 1996. Boat-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus major). In The Birds of North America, No. 271 (A. Poole and F. Gill, eds.). The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, PA, and The American Ornithologists' Union, Washington, D.C.