Does your state or country have the black bird grackles?

Yes, nasty things.

Tons in Vegas. Loud and obnoxious squawks.

They are smaller warm weather crows. Not up north because real crows and ravens kill them.

Nope, never seen them.
Actually never even heard of a grackle.

This^

You should leave Texas once in awhile OP, travel broadens the mind. And I don't mean Oklahoma.

Their feathers are so oily that they have a rainbow sheen in the sunlight.

They are an invasive brought in for study at UT Austin by resident ornithologist in the 60’s I think.

Dropped the ball on that study imo

Up north the ravens are big and mean looking but they always step aside for the seagulls.

But when a bald eagle shows up the seagulls disappear. That is the pecking order. Grackles stay far away.

I have watched ravens go head to head with gulls on the ground in territorial fights during the ravens nesting season. They are very evenly matched and there is often times blood involved .

Seldom a defined winner or loser . When it happens on the ground they face off like two roosters and jump kick each other in the breast with their talons .

Wow! I have never witnessed such a thing.

Yeah, any raptor scares scavengers because they have curved locking talons. All it takes is one jump to the chest and once a talon gets a grip, the scavenger bleeds out internally. The raptor just hangs on and waits for the punctured lung to bleed out. Youtube has a video of a small owl killing a raven like that in a faceoff on the ground.

[link to www.audubon.org (secure)]

One day one of my ravens flew through the yard with a redwing male on it's back . The raven rolled in flight in an attempt to grab the much smaller redwing with it's feet but the redwing latched on to the ravens lower feathers at the vent tube and copulated with the raven in mid flight and then broke away and flew back to the pond .

The raven looked no worse for ware and tear however I have the feeling it was humiliated .

I like them! They are cool and have a great sense of self. I usually empty the crap on the floor of my car out of the door so they have leftover munchie stuff to eat.

Yeah, they will harass raptors in the air but a ground to ground faceoff is a losing battle. All the Raven can do is peck and scratch, the raptor can kill with those feet.

We have those brown ones.

Those are Starlings.

Cant find the other video of the little owl killing the raven but it was similar to this. The raptor just sink in and locks the talons and eventually, the scavenger bleeds out.

A respectable parliament of ravens can ground a fully mature golden eagle and hold it there working as a group . They pull out the tail feathers and the feathers on the wing tips first and if the eagle does not make a clean escape they will alter the giants ability to hunt and in some cases even fly and the eagle will starve to death .

On the other side of the coin when a mature golden eagle finds a raven nest not protected by an adequate number of adult ravens it will and they do quickly slaughter the ravens chicks and drop them over the side onto the ground not even eating them .

Life in the wild is not always a peaceful friendly place to live .

The tail length helps ID them.

Grackle = long tail
Starling = short tail/

Last Edited by JustmeTX on 03/04/2021 01:05 PM

Rescue Grackle:

I've never meant a black bird I did not like , any bird for that matter . They are all the prime example and definition of meaningful life .

The murder of crows was going off as they watched the owl kill him!

I once saw a dead crow on the ground and when I approached to look at it I had a hundred crows screaming at me.

Little black dinosaurs they are.

I live on pwc eagles and ravens are every day life.In the spring the ravens raid the crows nests but crows murder up and attack the ravens.

And yet there are instances where entire individual species of crows have mated with ravens produced offspring and that distinctive species of crow has disappeared from the face of the earth .

Nature always finds a way .

No, never saw them until I was in Texas, San Antonio.

Taxes, Oklahoma and New mexico have them.

are these those rotten birds that find another birds nest and push the eggs out and lay their eggs in place so the other birds will raise them?