Tricolored Blackbird

Appearance

The tricolored blackbird is a passerine bird of the family Icteridae. The common name is taken from the male bird's distinctive white stripes underneath their red shoulder patches, or "epaulets", that are visible when the bird is flying or displaying.

Range and habitat

Although the tricolor has been able to adapt to some of the landscape changes, habitat loss played a major role in the reduction of its population. The tricolor originally could be found in the marshes of California, nesting in wetland cattails and bulrushes. Largely, this is due to human activity, and it's estimated that between the 1930s and 1980s alone, over 95% of wetlands were disappeared.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Breeding

Encourage and enhance active breeding colonies on public lands. This highly social and gregarious bird forms the largest colonies of any North American landbird, with a single breeding colony often consisting of tens of thousands of birds.

The bird migrates south during the colder seasons to Mexico and back to northern California during the warmer seasons.

In crisis

Tricolored Blackbird is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Tricolored Blackbird, Wikidata item Q890921. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.