Bobolink

About the Bobolink

The Bobolink is the backwards bird: a spring male looks like someone put a tuxedo on upside down -- black below, white and straw-yellow above -- the reverse of nearly every other songbird's light-belly pattern. Add the bubbling, banjo-string song spilling out of a May sky and there is nothing else like it in a Texas field.

Bobolinks are long-haul champions, flying from the grasslands of southern South America to hayfields across the northern United States and Canada -- roughly 12,000 miles round trip, one of the longest songbird migrations in the Americas. Texas sees them only in passage, and never reliably: a flock drops into a weedy field for a day or two in May, then vanishes north.

The species is listed as Near Threatened, its numbers falling as hayfields are cut earlier and grasslands disappear on both ends of that heroic migration -- which makes every Texas encounter feel like a small gift.

These photos come from a May 10, 2026 morning in Williamson County farm country, where a migrant flock worked the grass heads. Find the flock and stay with it: Bobolinks circulate through a field in waves, and the males eventually tee up on the tallest stems.