flocks

Maria Daddino sent me an e-mail reporting 100s of grackles all around her house and, as I was reading it, I looked out the window and what did I see? Common Grackles all over the place. When I went outside, the grackle din was deafening. They were not only spread out over the open areas around the house but they were on the ground all through the woods. Literally hundreds of Common Grackles, Quiscalus quiscala, feeding on the ground and engaging in a grackle gabble of extraordinary dimensions. What they talking about? Grackle gossip? Travel plans? There is obvious communication in these big flocks as they roam the territory. decide to drop in on Maria or Eric, and then, just as inexplicably, take off for someone else's back yard. All decisions seem to be made collectively -- by acclamation one might say if grackle squeaks and squawks can be thought of as acclamatory!

A couple of years ago I saw a flock over Riverhead that seemed to cover the sky -- literally tens of thousands of birds streaming overhead. There were a few other birds mixed in -- Red-winged Blackbirds, Brown-headed Cowbirds and Common Starlings -- in the flock but mostly it was grackles, grackles, grackles.

Grackles aren't the only blackbirds to flock up. The Red-wings tend to roost up at night and fly out to find food in fairly substantial pods. American Crows are getting flock-y as well and flocks of crows are called, rather charmingly, murders (this seems to be an old name going back to medieval England). There was a Murder of Crows making an awful racket and flying around the place for quite a while this morning and you can see why, on the eve of Halloween, they might stir up dark thoughts. There must have been two dozen birds in that crow bunch and it certainly seemed as though they were up to no good. Perhaps they were stirred up by a predator. Although I didn't see any hawks around this morning there was at least one feral cat which might easily have suggested mayhem to the collective corvid mind.

There was also a little mixed feeding flock of smaller birds moving through the woods, another sign of approaching winter. The birds in this collectivity consisted of the two kinglets, the two nuthatches, the two titmice (chickadees and titmice), two woodpeckers (Downy and Red-bellied) and at least one very shy Catharus thrush, probably a Hermit.

Eric Salzman