Field Notes—

The Return Of The Red Wings

By Curtiss Clark

One of the advantages of growing up outdoors is that memories closely associated with play, free time, and the limitless prospect of youth return to you with every new season throughout the rest of your life.

There was a time when children loathed being indoors. That’s where homework, the list of chores, and parental supervision confined the winding and wide impulses of young life to the straight and narrow. The goal among kids in my old neighborhood was to get out early and stay out late. Because we were pretty successful at this, we were exposed for hours of every day in every season to the natural world. We weren’t taking notes, but we were taking it all in.

So a few weeks ago when I heard the call of a red-winged blackbird for the first time this spring, it registered more as a memory than as a bird song. The memory was of a stretch of road on a summer day halfway to the distant last house on my paper route, overlooking the rotting wood walls of a long-abandoned outdoor hockey rink collapsing into a marsh. That was 45 years ago; the marsh would completely swallow the rink in just a few more years. The rink ruins were disappearing into thickets of cattails populated largely by red-winged blackbirds.

The song of these birds is woven tightly to their watery world — a fluid sound. I’ve seen it written out for birders: konk-la-ree. I suppose that would be it, but not really. Bird songs are what they are. You can’t write them down.

Red wings are one of the most common birds in North America, ranging from southeast Alaska to the east coast of Canada south through the US and wintering as far south as Central America. Thanks to their scarlet epaulets bordered in yellow, the males are among the easiest birds to identify. As usual in the avian world, the females are less distinctive and more difficult to spot, with streaked feathers of charcoal, brown, and buff that render them nearly invisible in the right environment.

Red-winged blackbirds are highly polygamous. In the Northeastern states, males mate with two or three females in their territories, and in regions where marsh insects are more plentiful their harem can include five or six. For all their attraction to the opposite sex, however, they travel in single-sex flocks.

Flocks of male birds arrive in the breeding grounds weeks ahead of the females. The males showed up at our feeders in mid-March; the females arrived just last week.

The males use their head start to establish defensible territories, keeping rival males at bay. When the females show up, they select a secure location for their nests high in the cattails, where they weave little cups of leaves, stalks, and fine grasses. Because the males have such defined territories, in selecting the location of their nest, the females are also selecting their mates.

Birds of every stripe are feeling amorous at this time of year. Love is, quite literally, in the air. It is obvious in the courtship displays of red-wing blackbirds how important those colorful shoulder patches are. The males splay their tail feathers, spread their wings and raise their epaulets and are the very model of a modern major general. All the posing and finery notwithstanding, they are fierce defenders of their nests, taking on marauding raptors, crows, and even curious humans who stray too close.

I’m happy the red wings are back in the neighborhood, performing their mating rituals, livening up the hubbub at the feeders, and consuming great quantities of insect pests. But mostly I’m happy to hear their song again. As a kid, I rode my bicycle by the old hockey rink on my paper route every day year after year. The red-wing blackbird’s song remains for me a valued link to that world and to that boy.