Rusty Blackbird

About the Rusty Blackbird

The Rusty Blackbird is the blackbird that birders actually chase - not because it is flashy, but because it is disappearing. Its population has crashed by an estimated 85-90 percent over the last half century, one of the steepest declines of any North American songbird, and the reasons are still only partly understood.

Winter birds, like this one, wear the plumage that names the species: black feathering broadly edged in rusty brown, with a pale staring yellow eye out of a buffy face. Spring males turn flat glossy black; females go slaty gray.

Rusties are the wetland specialists of the blackbird clan. They breed in boreal bogs across Canada and Alaska and winter in wooded swamps and soggy bottomlands, flipping wet leaves for aquatic insects rather than swirling over feedlots with the grackle hordes.

In Texas the species is an uncommon and declining winter visitor, mostly in the eastern half of the state - a bird worth reporting whenever found, and worth photographing while the chance still exists.