Red-winged blackbirds

A red-winged blackbird I photographed
in Canmore, Alberta (near Banff) in 2023

One sunny day during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, my parents and I went on a walk in a nearby park. As we strolled on a boardwalk that went alongside the vernal pools characteristic of the wetland park we were visiting, my mother gasped as she noticed a small bird that landed on a cattail next to us. When I looked as well, I couldn't help but smile. The bird shook his jet-black feathers a bit, then cried out his distinctive call, as if he were saying, "Look at me!" The most striking feature, however, was the color of the feathers along the front edges of his wings, near what you might describe as his shoulders: they were bright red.

My mom asked what kind of bird it was. "A red-winged blackbird," I replied. My mother, who was walking in front of me, turned around to smirk at me. She asked if I had just made that up. I laughed. I didn't blame her for asking that. The name "red-winged blackbird" is such a straightforward, mundane description of the bird that I could very well have come up with it on the spot. I did not make it up, however. The bird before us was in fact a male red-winged blackbird.

I owe my ability to recognize the red-winged blackbird to a woman named Ms. Bowman, my elementary school music teacher. Eminently passionate about nature and environmental conservation, Ms. Bowman would incorporate these subjects into her music lessons. As a matter of fact, I suspect that she faced may have faced some criticism and harassment from members of our community. I distinctly remember that there was a nontrivial fraction of my classmates that thought she was weird, and I wonder how much of that was a reflection of their parents being politically unsympathetic to environmentalism. Ms. Bowman was an avid birder. I remember that every fall, she would organize a community birdwatching event to observe chimney swifts enter the chimney of the 1919 Building at Sells Middle School in Dublin, Ohio. According to the Columbus Audubon, more than four thousand birds were once observed entering the chimney at that location. One of the birds that Ms. Bowman would often discuss was the red-winged blackbird, given its prevalence in our neighborhood. She was the first person I heard describe the red-winged blackbird's call as sounding like, "Look at me!" She was also the teacher who taught us about the game Great Big House in New Orleans, a topic which I have discussed in some blog posts.

Red-winged blackbirds are endemic to North America and can be found all throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. They are sexually dimorphic: you can easily identify a male with the striking contrast between his red and black feathers, but females look completely different, with nondescript dark brown feathers and no red feathers in sight. While it is not my favorite bird (that honor goes to the peregrine falcon, about which I wrote a blog post in March 2019), I will surely smile nostalgically whenever I encounter it.