Continue on to more birds.

Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula)

I was sitting on a bench watching this Grackle gather some food to take back to her nest of babies inside the top of a six foot lamppost. When she was getting ready to return to the nest, she spied a mockingbird sitting on the metal arm of the lamppost. You should have seen her sputter and ruffle her feathers -- never dropping the food in her bill. The mockingbird got the hint and flew off.

Unless you get close to the Grackle and see them in the sunlight, you don’t realize how beautiful and iridescent their feathers are. They’re really quite lovely -- especially when they’re angry. With their bright yellow eyes, the Common Grackle is one of the most abundant breeding birds in North America east of the Rocky Mountains. The easiest way to distinguish between the Florida spieces Common Grackle and the Boat-tailed Grackle is the yellow eyes of the Common Grackle. Boat-tailed Grackles from northern states do have yellow eyes but not the resident Florida birds. Photographed in Orange County, Florida.

Boat-tailed Grackle (Quiscaluis major)

North American icterids fall into three groups: the orioles; the meadowlarks and their allies including the Bobolink and the Yellow-headed Black Bird; and the grackles, blackbirds, and their allies including the cowbird.

A breeding strategy used by some icterids is harem-defense polygyny. The Boat-tailed Grackle is noted for this and is the only known harem-defending bird in North America. In this system, the male defends a group of females against other males from the breeding colony and does not allow lower-ranking males to mate. The highest-ranking male (the alpha male), who tends to be the oldest and heaviest, performs the majority of the copulations in the colony. Noevertheless, the alpha males sires only about 25 percent of the young, even though he may perform up to 87 percent of the observed copulations; it is likely that females copulate with lower-ranking males when foraging elsewhere. This type of mating system is exactly that of Northern Elephant Seals and many other mannals, but in birds it is found ony in the icterids.

In the Boat-tailed Grackles, the female is very different from the male, mainly brown with darker irridescent feathers on her back.

The male is a pretty glossy black. In this photo to the left, he is getting a drink of water. In the image below is a female. Both of these photos were taken at Lake Harris in Lake County, Florida. The female in the bottom image has a more reddish appearance than the female at the top of this section. She was being caught in the early morning sunlight while the other was in the shade.