Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus Bonaparte) (YHBL)1 has been a nemesis bird, a jinx bird for me. Over the course of six or eight trips to the west, I have not seen one for myself.
I was chatting with birders at the Great Salt Lake Bird Festival, and talked about birds we wanted to see. I sheepishly admitted that I was still on the trail of YHBL. “Oh, go to Farmington Bay, you’ll see them, no problem,” was the first bit of advice. Farmington Bay is an arm of the lake in Davis County; presumably they meant the sprawling Wildlife Management Area by that name. Then, on that Saturday, I got more targeted advice: Eccles Wildlife Education Center. “It’s where we used to have the festival until we outgrew it.”
So that afternoon, off I went. I headed up the track that runs north from the Center’s visitor center. Some nice birds in the ponds on either side, some of them a bit distant but photographable. Cornell’s Merlin app was running, and it suggested an audio match for Yellow-headed Blackbird. It occurred to me that I should review what the bird sounded like, so I pulled up the Sibley app as well. Towards the end of the track, almost to the northern boundary of the property, Merlin was matching on hardly anything else than YHBL.
So that raucous, creaky sound I was hearing, like an rusty screen door falling downstairs, was my bird.2 And then, a flash of yellow dropped out of the phragmites into the shorter grass.
Yay! a glimpse of the bird, enough for a twitch. But for a bird that I had sought for so long, could I get an identifiable photograph?
A bit of patience was in order.
Maybe a half dozen birds were up in the tops of the reeds, singing (yes, technically they’re songbirds). I snapped a few pix, generally seeing most of a partly obscured bird. All the while they continued to, um, vocalize.
I was ready to declare victory and return down the track, when my best photo op appeared, out in the open with the flick of white on the wing visible. Fifteen minutes of watching and listening had paid off.3
ABA Area lifer #453, Yellow-headed Blackbird.
1The only member of its genus, it is saddled with a binomial that repeats the genus and species epithet, literally “yellow-head yellow-head.” Perhaps Charles Bonaparte expected that it would be moved into a different genus, retaining the species epithet.
2Honestly, if I were a Briton, I would be miffed that we use the same name for the all-black singing thrush of Paul McCartney’s song (Turdus merula)and for the group of squonky oriole relatives of North America: grackles, cowbirds, and blackbirds.
3Casual birder and even more casual photographer that I am, armed with no more than a 300mm lens, I got an image good enough for my purposes. But it’s hardly going to be a competition winner.