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Red-winged Blackbird | Agelaius phoeniceus
Epauletspreeuw | Tordo sargento
The Red-winged Blackbird is a medium-sized blackbird of marshes, reedbeds and wet farmland. The male is black with red shoulder patches, the female brown and heavily streaked. In the guide area both resident birds and winter visitors from North America occur.
Voice
The song is a scratchy, gurgling conk-la-ree, sung from a reed stem with the shoulder feathers spread. The call is a hard check; females give a fast, harsh chatter.
Recording: Pat Goltz — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
18–24 cm. Male glossy black with a red shoulder patch bordered below by a yellow or buff edge; at rest often only the pale edge is visible. In some populations in Mexico and Central America the pale edge is almost absent. Bill pointed, conical and black; eye dark. Female smaller, dark brown with dense dark streaks on whitish underparts, a pale supercilium and often a pinkish or buff wash on throat and cheeks. Young males resemble females but are darker and already show an orange-red shoulder patch.
Confusion species
Tricolored Blackbird Agelaius tricolor, in the guide area only in north-western Baja California, has a deeper red shoulder patch with a white instead of yellow edge and a slimmer bill; the female is darker and more uniform grey-brown, with less contrast below. Females can also be mistaken for sparrows, but are larger, with a longer, pointed bill. The female of Yellow-headed Blackbird Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus is unstreaked brown with a yellow throat and breast.
Habitat
Freshwater marshes with reeds and cattails, wet grassland, rice fields, ditch banks, lake shores and brackish coastal marshes. It forages in fields and pastures, outside the breeding season often in large, mixed flocks with other blackbirds and cowbirds. It eats seeds, grain and insects. It breeds in loose colonies; males often have several females.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Breeds from Alaska and Canada through the United States to Central America; northern populations move south in winter. In the guide area locally common in northern Mexico and on the plateau, along the Pacific and Gulf coasts and on the Yucatán Peninsula, and further south in the lowlands of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua to north-western Costa Rica. In Panama scarce and very local. In winter large numbers of migrants join the birds in northern Mexico.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In the breeding season most easily found by listening for the scratchy song at reed edges; males sing from a tall stem. In winter large flocks over fields and rice paddies give the species away.
Conservation status
Not threatened (LC). One of the most numerous birds in North America; in the guide area locally common. Drainage of marshes removes breeding habitat, but the species also benefits from farmland and rice fields.
Scientific name
Agelaius phoeniceus | (Linnaeus, 1766)
Linnaeus described the species in 1766 as O[riolus] phoeniceus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Agelaius was introduced in 1816 by Vieillot. Agelaius is Greek, from agelaios 'gregarious, of a flock', after the birds feeding and roosting in large flocks. phoeniceus is Latin for 'crimson' (from Greek phoinix, Phoenician purple), after the red shoulder patches. The specimen the first description was based on came from Charleston, South Carolina.