by M. Kathy Raines

Grackles—people either love them, or they decidedly do not.

From first glimpse of a sleek, iridescent, purplish-hued great-tailed grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus), I have been smitten. I admire grackles’ regal tails, brash bearing and intriguingly varied vocalizations—clacks. shrieks, croaks and ascending whistles; they create a poignant symphony reminiscent of Stravinsky. 

Yet these grackles, much like cats—also responsible for the demise of little birds— certainly stir controversy.  People find them fascinating—as do I—or loathsome.  In fact, grackles score a #3 in current Austin Yelp! reviews, with comments ranging from love for “these creepy birds” to calling them “flying minions of Satan.”  One five-star review stated that Austin—famed for its “weirdness”—and those “weird birds” fit together.  

Many a birder decidedly pans these birds, not only for stealing food from songbirds, but sometimes eating their eggs or nestlings. Yet nature lovers, interestingly, are not taken aback by hawks who kill rodents and birds for a living, nor by an endangered ocelot who also does so.  Indeed, nature is “red in tooth and claw”, as per poet Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The spunky great-tailed grackle is indeed a survivor. Like raccoons, coyotes, common crows and vultures, it adapts splendidly to troublesome human beings, with our perennial forest-clearing, digging for fuel, and highway construction—proclivities that prompt a fierce struggle to save many species.  In the mid-1800s, one rarely saw these natives of Central American south of Corpus Christi.  Now, not only have they taken over the American Southwest, they appear even as far north as Canada.

Omnivorous birds that prefer semi-open fields to forests, these grackles thrive in our neighborhoods and grocery parking lots, which they patrol, ever alert for crumbs or discarded candy wrappers.  Comfortable with humans, they snatch away any unguarded morsels.

Along with seeds, grackles also eat animal matter, especially during summer and early autumn, including insects, eggs, hatchlings, small mammals, frogs, snakes and fish. Grackles devour butterflies and dragonflies that have been plastered to windshields and automobile grilles.  They also relish pet food, which they habitually dip in water before downing.  Grackles have reportedly listened for lawnmowers in order to eat displaced, flung-out insects and larvae. 

Grackles, with impressive adaptability, appear intelligent, though they exhibit neither the famous ingenuity, nor have the enlarged brains, of corvids—our local ones being green jays and elusive Chihuahuan ravens and Tamaulipas crows.  A recent study showed grackles capable of flexibility; they learned, for example, to use a stick to obtain food.  But grackles did not excel at innovation, a trait perhaps not vital to their expansion.

Though males do not fight, they defend their territory by tilting their bills so far up it appears they will fall backwards, raising and tilting their heads from side-to-side.

In courtship, a male fans its tail, fluffs out feather, shakes, and points its bill down, calling harshly.

These grackles are polygamous, with the female having sole responsibility for nest-building.  It forms a bulky bowl, often bound at the bottom with mud and manure.  They lay from three to five mottled, greenish-blue eggs. To their advantage, they apparently reject the eggs of the brown cowbird, infamous for laying eggs in other birds’ nests, tricking them into raising young cowbirds, at cost to their own species.   Female chicks, being smaller with a lower food requirement, have a greater survival rate than males; in fact, female great-tale grackles appear to outnumber males. The oldest recorded great-tale was 7 years and 9 months old.