By Jeanne Church
Few species are as polarizing as grackles. You either love them or hate them. Their habit of foraging in huge flocks makes them a multimillion-dollar pest. Grackles devour sorghum, wheat, corn, soybeans, and rice with a vengeance, as well as the food from our backyard feeders. They steal worms from the robins and seeds from the songbirds. What’s not to love?
As a nature photographer, I tend to look at the world through an entirely different lens, both literally and figuratively. I search for whatever beauty I can find in the most ordinary of things, even if those ordinary things are annoying, irritating, or threatening. Grackles are all of those things, as well as beautiful, intelligent, and resourceful.
It’s quite easy to overlook grackles as just another ubiquitous bird lumped in with all the starlings, red-winged blackbirds, and crows. From a distance, they look like any other darkly feathered, nondescript bird. Up close, and in the right light, however, male grackles are particularly stunning. They have glossy iridescent feathers in varying shades of purple, green, bronze, and blue. Their bright golden eyes stand in sharp contrast to their richly-colored feathers, and give them a rather intense look. Female grackles, on the other hand, are more subdued; a common characteristic among females of most bird species. Subdued colors make mama birds less obvious to predators while they sit on their eggs or tend to their young.
If you’re not as captivated by the grackle’s beauty as I am, then perhaps you’ll be impressed with the fact that they are beneficial predators who eat a wide variety of insects and other critters that are either troubling to humans or harmful to plants, like wasps, spiders, caterpillars, grasshoppers, and beetles. Grackles also love mice, rats, lizards, and bats!
And pink cookies.
According to Heather Kuhlken of Austin, Texas, the founder and director of Families in Nature, “Pink sugar cookies from Fiesta are their favorite.”
My guess is a grackle’s favorite food is anything that’s easy to grab! They are the ultimate opportunists. If you are the least bit inattentive, grackles will steal food right from your hand or off your plate! I once saw a grackle fly off with a large, triangular slice of pizza that was even bigger than he was!
Grackles, in turn, become tasty meals for a wide variety of other creatures, like raccoons, foxes, hawks, and owls. Squirrels and snakes also prey upon grackles by stealing their eggs and eating their young.
What you might not know and appreciate about grackles is how quietly and politely they settle their disputes. When male grackles want to establish dominance, they engage in a form of non-violent competition known as “bill tilt”. They tip their heads back, point their beaks in the air, and compete to see who can maintain that posture the longest. The last one standing in that position is the winner!
When I first saw a group of grackles engaging in this behavior, I was mystified. I thought maybe they had heard a hawk overhead and were scanning the skies. But when I saw that same behavior over and over again, with no hawk in sight, I went looking for answers. Little did I know, it was just their quiet, unobtrusive way to elect a leader!
Whether you love them or hate them, grackles are here to stay. They are beautiful, intelligent birds who have learned to live among us much better than we have learned to live with them. Their ability to thrive in our ever-expanding urban environment stands in testament to both their adaptability and their resourcefulness.
Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates those strengths.
