Yellow-headed Blackbird

About the Yellow-headed Blackbird

A male Yellow-headed Blackbird looks almost too bold to be real: a deep black body wearing a brilliant golden-yellow hood down over the chest, with white wing patches flashing in flight. The scientific name says it twice - Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus, "yellow-head yellow-head" - as if once were not enough.<br><br>The sound is another matter. The male's song is a strangled, rasping buzz, often described as rusty hinges - a genuinely awful noise delivered with total commitment from a cattail tip.<br><br>Yellow-headeds breed in deep-water marshes of the western plains, where colonies claim the prime cattail stands and push the smaller Red-winged Blackbirds to the edges. Texas mostly meets them in migration and winter, when flocks roll through the Panhandle and West Texas, swirling over feedlots and grain fields, frequently mixed with red-wings, cowbirds, and starlings.<br><br>Scanning a winter blackbird swarm for that flash of gold is a classic High Plains pastime - and when several hundred males rise out of a stubble field at once, the sight fully lives up to that double-barreled name.