Bird Profile

Red-winged Blackbird

One of the most abundant birds in North America, and the one most likely to arrive at your feeder in a flock of thirty in March. It is also federally protected, so the only tool you have is the feeder itself.

The Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) is a slim, pointed-billed blackbird of marshes, ditches and hayfields, and one of the most abundant birds on the continent. Males are glossy black with red and yellow shoulder patches. Females are brown and heavily streaked and look like a different species entirely.

At feeders it is a seasonal visitor rather than a resident problem. Flocks arrive in late winter and early spring, work through anything small and starchy, and disperse to breeding marshes by May. It is a native bird protected by federal law, so the response is the same as for grackles: change the feeder, not the bird.

This profile covers identifying both sexes, the song and the shoulder display, the seasonal pattern behind the flocks, feeder tactics, and why one of these birds may spend June diving at your head.

How to identify a Red-winged Blackbird#

Males are glossy black with a scarlet shoulder patch, called an epaulet, edged below in buff or yellow. The important detail is that the red is adjustable. A displaying male flares it into a blazing badge; a subordinate bird feeding in a flock can cover almost all of it, leaving a thin yellow line or nothing at all. A plain-looking black bird with a slim pointed bill and a medium-length tail in a March flock is usually this species.

Females are dark brown above with heavy dark streaking below, a bold pale eyebrow, a pale streaked throat, and often a rusty wash on the shoulders and back. First-year males look like large dark females with patchy orange-red shoulders.

Against the other black birds:

Two regional notes. In California's Central Valley, the bicolored form shows red shoulders with little or no yellow border. Also in California, the similar Tricolored Blackbird has a white rather than yellow border and is a species of serious conservation concern, so look twice at any colony there.

Song, display and why the shoulders matter#

The male's song is a gurgling, buzzing conk-la-ree given from a cattail, fence post or roadside sapling, usually with the body hunched, the tail spread and the epaulets flared. The performance and the song go together: experiments have long shown that a male whose red patches are hidden struggles to hold a territory.

Both sexes give a hard chack call, and a flock feeding under a feeder produces a constant low chatter that carries across a yard.

Where they live outside your yard#

The breeding habitat is any wet, dense, low vegetation: cattail and bulrush marshes first, then wet meadows, drainage ditches, retention ponds, hayfields and roadside brush. Territories in a good marsh can be packed within a few yards of each other, which is why a small pond can hold a dozen singing males.

Outside the breeding season they move onto farmland, feedlots, stubble fields and flooded pasture, where waste grain is abundant. That shift is the reason a rural yard sees them in numbers while a yard in dense suburbs a few miles away may only get a handful.

Body size varies quite a bit across the range. Northern and interior birds are larger than southern and coastal ones, and males are noticeably bigger and heavier than females everywhere.

When they turn up at feeders#

The pattern is predictable across most of the range.

• Late winter to early spring. Males push north well ahead of females, often arriving in late February or March. Natural food is at its low point and feeders stand out, so this is the peak flock window.
• Late spring and summer. Birds disperse to marshes, wet ditches and hayfields to nest, and switch heavily to insects. Feeder visits drop to a few local birds.
• Fall. Flocks reform for migration, often mixed with grackles, cowbirds and starlings, and may hit feeders hard for a couple of weeks. Handling that window is covered in feeding birds during migration.
• Winter. In the South and parts of the West, blackbirds stay all season and gather in enormous communal roosts that can hold hundreds of thousands of birds, spreading out to forage by day.

What they eat, and the feeder changes that follow#

Roughly three quarters of the annual diet is plant material, mostly seeds and waste grain, with insects dominating in summer and being fed almost exclusively to nestlings. At feeders they want small grain on a flat surface.

A tube feeder with no tray and perches under three quarters of an inch (2 cm) is difficult for a bird this size, and a caged feeder with mesh around 1.5 inches (4 cm) rules them out completely while chickadees, titmice and finches carry on.

Nesting, and the bird that dives at your head#

Females build a deep woven cup lashed to cattails, reeds, willow stems or dense shrubs, usually within a few feet of water or wet ground. Clutches are typically 3 to 4 pale blue-green eggs with dark scrawls, incubation runs about 11 to 13 days, and young leave the nest around 11 to 14 days after hatching.

The mating system is worth knowing. A single male may hold a territory containing many nesting females, sometimes more than ten. Genetic studies have also shown that a substantial share of the young in his territory are fathered by neighboring males, so his apparent dominance is less complete than it looks.

Territorial defense is aggressive and indiscriminate. Males attack crows, hawks, herons and people, diving from behind and sometimes making contact with the back of the head. This runs from late May into July.

Population and status#

Red-winged Blackbirds number in the hundreds of millions and are among the most numerous land birds in North America, so nobody worries about the species as a whole. Long-running continental surveys nonetheless show a steady decline since the 1960s, driven mainly by wetland loss, changes in hay cutting that destroy nests, and decades of large-scale roost control aimed at protecting crops.

They also do measurable good. A breeding pair feeds enormous numbers of insects to nestlings, including many crop and garden pests, which is one reason a marsh at the end of the road is worth having.

Living with a blackbird spring#

• Pull cracked corn, millet and cheap mixes from February through May.
• Store open platforms and ground trays for the same window.
• Keep one caged sunflower feeder and one nyjer feeder running so your resident birds do not leave.
• Sweep spilled seed twice a week, which also keeps rodents and mold down.
• Keep the bird bath going. Water costs you nothing and every bird in the yard benefits.
• Plant a wet corner or a native shrub edge if you have room. A yard supported by native plants spreads birds out instead of concentrating them on one feeder.