At least five male Red-wing Blackbirds were all over this Common Grackle at Jamaica Bay. In the last picture, one is quite literally riding the CG out of the town. Nobody says “get off my lawn” quite like a Red-winged Blackbird. Backyard and Beyond has a friend who was chased out of a swamp once by one of these birds, which didn’t seem to care about any of the other humans there at the time.
Here’s another showcasing his control of his red shoulder patches. He can make these almost disappear or he can puff them out like stiff epaulets. Is this the boss of the ‘hood? Typically, several females with have nests with one dominant male in a patch. However, there may be more than one father of a female’s clutch of eggs, since less dominant males spend more time on subtlety than show…
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This work by Matthew Wills is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Backyard and Beyond 
Thank you for the daily portion of natural beauty,
coming in the most enjoyable emails every day.
I wish it will continue for a long, long time.
Thanks, Eva!
There’s a huge back catalog, as it were, of posts to explore, too, since I started this in 2010.
A pair of hawks were nesting on the side of our suburban office building (several years ago) and paid no attention to the hundreds of employees who would to and fro on the parking lot four floors below them. Except there was one young woman that they hawks would dive on for some reason. It got to be a spectator sport. The young woman would go out the front door, and all the young men in the building would follow her (natch!) to watch the hawks go after her. Every time.
Studies with crows show they have excellent memory for faces, which, if I remember rightly (no crow brain here), they can teach their young.
The Grackle didn’t have a chance– thanks for showcasing the amazing acrobatic talents of the Red-Winged Blackbird.