{"id":142,"date":"2008-01-25T19:11:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-26T00:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/?p=142"},"modified":"2008-01-25T19:11:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-26T00:11:00","slug":"watching-rusty-blackbirds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/?p=142","title":{"rendered":"Watching Rusty Blackbirds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our flock of about 200 Rusty Blackbirds is still in the neighborhood. This morning \u2013 a peaceful, cold, clear day \u2013 they were spread out across some grassy yards, under bare-limbed pecan trees, and I was able to get closer to them than usual and spent several minutes watching them. They all seemed to be Rusties. I saw no Grackles, Red-winged Blackbirds or others. They were relatively quiet, just making <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">smacking<\/span> calls to each other as they hunted busily in the grass. <\/p>\n<p>Although at first glance they just look like \u201cblackbirds,\u201d a closer look shows a lot of variation in coloring, and many individual birds are distinctive \u2013 which makes them fun to watch. The glossy black males have startlingly pale, yellow eyes, and most show some degree of rusty coloring across their back and shoulders that glows in the sunlight. The females show more variations in the patterns and shades of their tawny plumage, but all have the characteristic dark eye patch and pale streak over the eye \u2013 and altogether they have a much more nuanced and interesting appearance than the males.<\/p>\n<p>I still don\u2019t know if there are Brewer\u2019s Blackbirds among them. It\u2019s possible. A few of the females did not appear to have pale eyes, and a few of the males looked very iridescent and showed no rusty coloring \u2013 but that might have been a trick of the light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our flock of about 200 Rusty Blackbirds is still in the neighborhood. This morning \u2013 a peaceful, cold, clear day \u2013 they were spread out across some grassy yards, under bare-limbed pecan trees, and I was able to get closer to them than usual and spent several minutes watching them. They all seemed to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}