This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we’re hearing the inane and insane babbling of the Boat-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus major).
The Boat-tailed Grackle is a large member of the Blackbird family, Icteridae, and is typically a foot or more in length. They bear a long and rounded tail, lanky legs, and a dagger-like bill. Males are an oily iridescent black that often runs into shades of indigo across the body. Females range from a washed-out walnut to cinnamon-chocolate plumage, either extreme contrasting their shale-black flight feathers. Both sexes wear a sour demeanor. A look of simmering aggravation communicated through piercing banana-yellow eyes.
The size and color of a Boat-tailed Grackle are usually more than sufficient to identify them at a glance. Yet they are even more easily identified by their voice. The song of the male is a lovely string of screeching hollers, garbled gargling, and ear-splitting buzzes that command attention but scarcely admiration. To make matters worse, they are non-migratory and live in colonies. So rarely is one treated to a single seasonal shrieking soliloquy rather than an unceasing quarrelsome quartet. Females are thankfully far less vocal, sticking to simple barks and squawks.
As mentioned previously, Boat-tailed Grackles live in sedentary colonies making them a year-round resident of Edisto Island. They are a coastal species that is highly dependent on salt marsh and other tidal wetlands for habitat. They’re often spotted roosting on hammocks, docks, and marsh grass or foraging on beaches, mud flats, and oyster beds. However, this here Grackle is quite adaptable and they’ve taken quite the shine to beach urbanization. Boat-tailed Grackles are omnivorous and they’ve found themselves at home with coastal commercialization. Much like our Laughing Gulls, they’ve taken to patrolling parking lots and wharfs in search of wayward scraps. Their colonies make good use of docks, bridges, and causeways as stages for their unintelligible ramblings and vantages for foraging. They nest low in wet thickets and over marshes, areas rarely disturbed and often nearby to coastal developments.
