Species Profile: The Boat-tailed Grackle

Boat-tailed Grackles. Photo be Jerry Golub, Audubon Photography Awards.

By Steve Phenicie
 
“When you go back to Atlanta, why don’t you take some of those Boat-tailed Grackles with you?” That was the comment made a few years ago by a coastal resident to a group of metro area birders.
 
These often noisy birds — which can leave messy droppings, damage crops and have a call sometimes described as harsh — won’t win any Miss or Mr. Congeniality awards from human beings. Other birds aren’t enamored with them either because of their aggressive behavior, which can include gobbling up eggs and nestlings.
 
As their name suggests, the most prominent feature of the males, their tail, is kind of like Dolly Parton’s wigs – big and showy. This bird is smaller than a Fish Crow but larger than a Common Grackle, with males glossy black all over. Females — which almost look like a different species — are dark brown above and russet below, with a subtle face pattern made up of a pale eyebrow, dark cheek, and pale “mustache” stripe.
 
You won’t find them anywhere near Atlanta — only along marshes, beaches, flooded fields, and mudflats near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Connecticut to Texas except in Florida, where they pretty much inhabit the entire state. Their diet includes aquatic insects, snails, crayfish, crabs, mussels, shrimp, tadpoles, frogs, small fish, grasshoppers, and caterpillars. For variety, they add parking-lot french fries, bread, rice, dog food, commercial bird seed, and fruit crops.
 
The boat-tailed nests in colonies, usually near water: in cattails, sawgrass, or bulrushes, in bushes or saplings at edge of a marsh, or in taller trees. The nest is generally less than 12 feet above ground or water but can be much higher. Nesting and raising the young is mostly a female affair. She builds a large, bulky cup of twigs, grass, weeds, bulrushes, Spanish moss, or other materials, often with mud added to base and lined with fine grass.
 
There she usually lays two to four pale greenish blue eggs and incubates them for 13 to 15 days. Feeding the young is entirely her responsibility, too, and they leave the nest about 12 to 15 days after hatching.
 
Some cool facts about the Boat-tailed Grackle:

• When it comes to getting around, these birds don’t exactly compete with Delta. Most spend their lives within about 10 miles of where they hatch.
  
• Until the 1970s, this bird was considered to be the same species as the Great-tailed Grackle, but the two overlap on the coasts of Texas and Louisiana without interbreeding.
  
• They are fairly common within their restricted range, but populations declined by about 47 percent between 1966 and 2014, according to the North America Breeding Bird Survey. Partners in Flight estimates the global breeding population at 2 million, with all of them in the United States.
  
• Their eye color varies with range. Gulf Coast and inland birds have dark eyes, but Atlantic birds have pale eyes.
  
• Their most serious predators are yellow rat snakes that attack their nests, but they are also preyed upon by rats, alligators, and Purple Gallinules.