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Grackles!

© Mel. White

Grackles.... talk about your trashy trash-birds! Sparrows and starlings are considered nuisances, but there's few birds more likely to inspire homeowners to turn their cats outdoors than the arrival of a flock of grackles at the bird feeder. Big, shrieking, sinister-looking birds dressed in irridescent black, hardly anyone in the known universe has a kind word for them -- except, perhaps, for my husband. For some reason, he finds them interesting.

Grackles... we're all allowed our little madnesses, I suppose, and if he likes to photograph the grackles, well, it's a harmless diversion. I figured that someone, somewhere probably had something nice to say about grackles. After all, some of us like starlings, so there's bound to be folks who like this rather under-loved blackbird. Even if it's only a rather demented poet. . In fact, there's a number of grackle poems on the Internet. I'm not sure why such an unpopular bird gets so much poetry written about it.

The real problem with grackles seems to be that they're large and messy, and in large social flocks, they're VERY messy. This is one bird that actually benefits from our suburban lifestyle; studies show that the number of grackles found in prairie areas (flat grass, no trees) is very small compared to the number of grackles in greenbelts and housing areas. Although they aren't "nest predators" (laying their eggs in the nests of other birds, like their relatives, the cowbirds), they eat grains, insects, and other birds' eggs. It's the latter trait that makes them particularly unwelcome, although they seem to be reasonably good parents (judging from the number of grackles around). Unfortunately, they're not the sort of bird that humans tend to love and their musical talents (they have none) don't improve this bad image, either.

Although humans don't seem to care much for grackles, other grackles do like grackles and find areas where humans live to be perfect for grackles. One of the most social birds around, they hang around in packs from dawn till evening when they flock to trees in your area to catch up on the day's gossip and bed down for the night. You can usually tell their trees by the white stuff on the ground underneath. It's not snow -- trust me.

I can say from experience that they do like sunflower seeds, peanuts, oats, and bread. In fact, if you're feeding sunflower seeds to the jays and cardinals, you'll soon have the grackles in the area visiting. They also seem to like cracked corn, though this varies from bird to bird. We didn't have grackles visiting until we put up the cardinal feeder and changed to a birdseed mix with more black sunflower and some cracked corn in it.

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