Weekly Puzzler Answer #218

The handsome bird in last week’s puzzler is a Yellow-Headed Blackbird, which as you can see from the pictures, is a perfect name for this bird. It is related to Red-Winged Blackbirds, Cowbirds and Grackles. All of these have a sharp-pointed, conical bills.

The bird pictured and in the video is a male. He has a distinctive yellow head and breast and a white wing patch and is about the size of a robin. Females also have the yellow chest, but their color is browner and they lack the bright yellow head.

In the summer, Yellow-Headed Blackbirds forage mostly on invertebrates, including aquatic insects like dragonfly, damselfly and other nymphs near or in water, such as a lake or river edge. They spend summers in wetlands in prairies, mountain meadows, aspen forests and around shallow areas of ponds, rivers and marshes. The rest of the year these birds eat mostly seeds.

Yellow-Headed Blackbirds will join thousands of other birds in the spring and fall to form huge mixed flocks that will forage in crop fields and ranchlands. Several years ago when I was in Nebraska, at a place called Cheyenne Bottoms, which is the largest marsh in the interior of the United States, and the most important shorebird migration point in the western hemisphere. I highly recommend visiting if you ever find yourself in the area, especially if you are interested in bird watching. I was there in early spring, April, and witnessed many, many species of birds, including giant mixed flocks that included Red-Winged Blackbirds, Cowbirds, Yellow-Headed Blackbirds and Grackles. They were amazing to watch, forming huge clouds of rolling shapes in the sky that would descend upon the fields and then largely disappear in the grass.

For our next puzzler, we going to do another bird, this one a ground bird with a short tail and a distinctive call. It’s a video puzzler… listen….