Which Black Bird Is That?

Black birds get lumped together, and the four common ones differ in shape enough to be told apart from a moving car.

Shape first

Grackle: long. A long tail that folds into a keel shape in flight, long legs, a long heavy bill. Walks with a stalking gait.

Starling: short. A stubby triangular tail, a plump body, pointed wings, and a fast direct flight. On the ground it walks with a distinctive waddling hurry.

Cowbird: small and compact, with a short thick conical bill more like a finch than a blackbird.

Red-winged blackbird: medium, slim, with a sharply pointed bill and, in the male, red shoulder patches that are sometimes hidden.

The eye

Grackles have a striking pale yellow eye that shows at surprising distance and that none of the others have. On a bird otherwise hard to judge for size, this is the fastest confirmation available.

Starlings in winter

Worth flagging because they change appearance entirely. In autumn and winter the fresh feathers have pale tips, giving a heavily spotted look, and the bill turns dark.

People who know starlings as glossy black birds with yellow bills frequently do not recognise the spotted winter bird as the same species, and it gets reported as something unusual every year.

Cowbirds and the nest question

Brown-headed cowbirds lay their eggs in other birds' nests and leave the host to raise the young. The chick grows faster and larger than the host's own, and often out-competes them.

That makes an outsized nestling being fed by a much smaller bird a recognisable sight, and it is worth knowing before concluding that a small bird has produced an enormous young — the situation that also comes up in a baby bird on the ground.

Red-winged blackbirds without red

The male shows the red shoulder when displaying and can conceal it almost entirely at rest, leaving a plain black bird with a thin yellow border sometimes visible.

The female is a different problem: heavily streaked brown, frequently mistaken for a large sparrow, and one of the more common misidentifications at a feeder.

Crows and ravens are separate

Both are much larger and are separated from this group immediately on size. Distinguishing them from each other is a different exercise, covered in crow or raven.

A grackle beside a crow looks slight; a grackle alone on a lawn is often reported as a crow, and size judged without a reference is unreliable.

Flocking

All four flock, and in autumn they flock together, which means a large flock of black birds usually contains more than one species.

Scanning such a flock for tail length and eye colour is the practical approach, and it is more productive than trying to name the flock as a whole. Mixed flocks are the norm rather than the exception, and expecting them prevents a lot of confusion.

Sound as a shortcut

Grackles produce a harsh rising creak often compared to a rusty gate. Starlings mimic other species and mix in whistles, clicks and imitations of car alarms. Red-winged blackbirds give the familiar liquid conk-la-ree from a reed or a fence post.

Learning those three sounds identifies most black birds without looking at them at all, which is the argument made more fully in identifying birds by song.