Boat-tailed Grackle

About the Boat-tailed Grackle

The Boat-tailed Grackle is the saltmarsh cousin of the Great-tailed Grackle every Texan knows from the grocery store parking lot -- and telling the two apart on the upper coast is a genuine birding skill. The key is the eye: upper Texas coast Boat-taileds have dark brown eyes, while Great-tailed Grackles of both sexes stare back with pale yellow ones. Boat-taileds also stick tight to the marsh itself, rarely wandering far from salt water.

Males are glossy blue-black with the namesake keel-shaped tail; females, like the bird in this photo, are warm tawny-brown with a dark cap and that soft dark eye. Their harsh rolling calls and jumbled squeaks are part of the marsh soundtrack from Sabine Pass down through Galveston.

In Texas this is strictly a coastal specialty of the upper and central coast, which makes it a real hole in the collection for an inland photographer -- one of those birds you see on every coast trip and somehow never photograph properly.

This female was working the saltmarsh vegetation near Bolivar in April 2022. Getting the dark eye sharp in the frame was the whole point: it is the field mark, so it had to be the photograph.