{"id":168071,"date":"2025-05-01T05:51:28","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T11:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=168071"},"modified":"2025-05-01T07:11:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T13:11:17","slug":"female-brewers-blackbirds-gathering-nesting-material","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/01\/female-brewers-blackbirds-gathering-nesting-material\/","title":{"rendered":"Female Brewer’s Blackbirds Gathering Nesting Material"},"content":{"rendered":"

Including a female that I’ll call “footicapped”.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two days ago I visited a local park right at sunrise to see what birds I might find.<\/p>\n

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The most excitement was provided by multiple female Brewer’s Blackbirds collecting nesting material.<\/p>\n

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At least a half-dozen different females seemed to be taking turns flying down from the trees and gathering dried bits of grass and other materials in their beaks and then flying back to the trees with their booty.<\/p>\n

The biggest trouble I had was getting light in their eyes. With the sun so low they were often in shade and when they did have light on them, they were in side light. I rarely got light on their entire bodies, like I did here.<\/p>\n

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Other times they had so much ‘stuff’ in their bills I couldn’t see much of their face, including their eye.<\/p>\n

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This female picked up a hitchhiker. I’m not sure what it is but to me it looks like it might be a dark egg mass of some kind. That’s only a guess but it does appear to be “sticky”.<\/p>\n

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Their gathering activities can best be described as “frenetic”. They were rushing in every direction, picking up what appealed to them, and then looking for more. At times the stuff in their bills blocked their vision, so they occasionally stumbled around like blind birds.<\/p>\n

Many male blackbirds were nearby but they never helped with the task at hand. In Brewer’s Blackbirds, nest construction is done almost exclusively by females.<\/p>\n

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I tried to get takeoff shots I liked but in that light it wasn’t easy.<\/p>\n

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This female was completely missing her left foot, with only a knobby stump in its place.<\/p>\n

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It didn’t slow her down though. She was just as efficient in her task as all the other females. Her gathering activities looked so normal to me, I didn’t even notice her handicap (footicap?) until I looked at my photos at home.<\/p>\n

These blackbird nesting activities weren’t the only signs of spring I saw that morning. On one occasion, when I finally looked up from my viewfinder, I saw…<\/p>\n

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an entire family of Canada Geese across the pond from me. They were in the shade and often obstructed but it was still fun to see them.<\/p>\n

And speaking of blackbirds and spring, last evening I had a very welcome visitor in my back yard. I was sitting in a chair next to my feeder, trying to keep warm in the last spot of sunshine, when on old, feathered friend landed on the feeder less than 10′ away from me. It was the very distinctive leucistic male Red-winged Blackbird<\/a><\/span><\/span> that has been coming to my yard occasionally for at least three years now.<\/p>\n

He’s much more skittish than the other blackbirds so I knew that if I blinked he’d be gone, so I just watched him. He’s strikingly beautiful with all those bright white flight feathers in his left wing.<\/p>\n

No photos of course. I didn’t have my camera gear with me and besides, I was much too close. Maybe next time.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Including a female that I’ll call “footicapped”. (9 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,1336,391,390],"tags":[7800,7799,7370,311],"class_list":["post-168071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-canada-goose","category-nesting-and-mating","category-red-winged-blackbirds","tag-canada-goose-babies","tag-female-brewers-blackbirds-gathering-nesting-materials","tag-leucistic-red-winged-blackbird","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/brewers-blackbird-0826-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-HIP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168071"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168114,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168071\/revisions\/168114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}