This afternoon around 3:00, several Rusty Blackbirds were among a small flock of other blackbirds (maybe 100 at most), including Common Grackles and Red-winged, foraging in yards in our neighborhood. The day was damp and gray and chilly, and a light rain had just begun to fall.<\/p>\n
The \u201crusty\u201d pattern on the plumage of the male Rusty Blackbirds looked bright and vivid, almost like copper.<\/p>\n
I think this was a small part of a larger mixed flock of Grackles and Red-winged Blackbirds (as many as four or five hundred at a time on a couple of days) that I\u2019ve seen several times recently, but this is the first time this season I\u2019ve been able to find Rusty Blackbirds among them. I\u2019ve been watching for them because the past two years we\u2019ve had a number of Rusties that stayed around through the winter season, and it was fun to be able to spend some time watching them and become more familiar with them. They\u2019re considerably less noisy and smaller than Common Grackles, and usually seem to sort of stick together within a larger mixed flock.<\/p>\n
Rusty Blackbirds are \u201cperhaps the least well known of North America\u2019s blackbirds,\u201d according to the species account in Birds of North America<\/span>.* There are some indications that their populations are declining, but because they are rather inconspicuous and have not been widely studied, there\u2019s much that remains to be learned about them.<\/p>\n Discovering Rusty Blackbirds has been another lesson for me in not taking common things for granted. When I saw a flock of blackbirds in the past, I used to just see \u201cblackbirds.\u201d The first time I saw the Rusties two years ago, it was like suddenly seeing a hidden image in a complex picture \u2013 they were there all along, but I hadn\u2019t seen them because I just hadn\u2019t looked. It seems to be a lesson I have to learn over and over again \u2013 to really look<\/span> at what\u2019s here right in front of me.<\/p>\n *Avery, Michael L. 1995. Rusty Blackbird (Euphagus carolinus<\/span>), The Birds of North America Online <\/span>(A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This afternoon around 3:00, several Rusty Blackbirds were among a small flock of other blackbirds (maybe 100 at most), including Common Grackles and Red-winged, foraging in yards in our neighborhood. The day was damp and gray and chilly, and a light rain had just begun to fall. The \u201crusty\u201d pattern on the plumage of the […]<\/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\/227"}],"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=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}