Researcher Explores Habits of Female Red-Winged Blackbirds

By Ben Neary

NMWF

The male red-winged blackbird is a noisy showoff with flamboyant coloration and a penchant for singing wildly. The female, however, is more reserved, less colorful and less well known.

Chris Walker, a doctoral student in biology at the University of New Mexico, has studied the female red-winged blackbird. She has discovered that they have songs of their own and their own characteristic behavior.

Walker will discuss her findings as the featured speaker at the New Mexico Wildlife Federation’s “Wildlife Wednesday” event May 13 in Albuquerque.

“Studying females of different species is just as important as the males,” Walker said. “There’s not been a ton of research done on females.”

Red-winged blackbirds are fond of marshy areas and are a common sight at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Area and along waterways and damp fields elsewhere.

Male red-winged blackbirds are a familiar sight to birders in New Mexico and around the country. They’re black with red and yellow patches on their shoulders while the females are dark brown.

“They’re a really big backyard bird in most, if not all, of North America and you can typically find them around water sources, or like marshlands or swamps, different things like that,” Walker said. “They nest in marshes, often like cattails, or reeds, and males have like a loud, they call it a ‘conk-la-ree’ sound.

“Females have two songs that are different from the males,” Walker said. “So that’s another entirely different thing that’s super cool that females have a different song as well. Not only do the females have an entirely different song, they actually have two song types that they’ll sing while they’re displaying.”

Walker said many researchers have focused on how male red-winged blackbirds use visual signaling, their body size, the coloring on their wings and their song to communicate with eachother and indicate the territories that they have.

“Females do the same thing,” Walker said. “And because they’re not kind of as flashy as the males, I guess, they are often overlooked.”

Walker said she has researched the body size, wing length and leg length of female birds. She said she compared that to the coloration on their wings.

“Females do the same kind of vocal displays, where they will poof out their wings, they’ll poof out their body and they’ll sing,” Walker said. “And for some reason, that gets overlooked a lot. So I was looking for how all of those traits go together with eachother, and what that means for the implications of dominance and territoriality that females could have.” 

Walker said her research is contributing to birders’ overall knowledge of the female bird. 

“I contributed more research to saying that females probably have dominance and territoriality, and then there’s some stuff that I haven’t gotten into a ton yet, but I would like to in the future,” Walker said. She has found that female birds, like the males, have a characteristic behavior of tipping their bills down, as if to convey that they’re sizing up whatever they’re looking at. She said she’s also found that the female birds control the display of a peach-colored patch on their throats.

Walker started work on her doctoral degree at UNM last fall. Before that, she worked with the Rocky Mountain Bird Conservancy banding captured birds. 

Walker said she intends to focus her doctoral work on studying bird toxicity in New Guinea. Certain species there contain neurotoxins on their skin and their feathers, similar to the toxin on dart frogs.

Walker’s free presentation starts at 5:30 p.m., May 13, at the Marble Brewery Northeast Heights Taproom, 9904 Montgomery Blvd., NE., Albuquerque.