Wildlife Spotting

Hi Nathan. If you are serious about birds (or anything else) a small field guide would be a help. You can study the flocks and see if they contain more than one species. In Asia some mixed species flocks can contain more than 20 different species. For the photographs take several pictures and choose the best one or two, if you use a digital camera you can delete the ones that are no good and take more. Identification can be difficult, especially those which change or lose colours with the seasons, and with youngsters, but as you begin to recognise the more common ones it gets a lot easier. Finally, its not only Blackbirds that are black but many other species also, and in poor light even more appear to be black, especially blue and brown birds. Enjoy your spotting whichever route you take.

They look a bit like common grackles to me; the tail seems large for a blackbird. They often form large (huge) mixed flocks with red winged blackbirds here as they migrate north in April. To answer your question, Nathan, there are several kinds of blackbirds. In Ontario, for example, there are 4 kinds (red winged, rusty, brewers and yellow-headed).

I'll accept that, my book doesn't mention their flocking habit and I was thinking they didn't look quite right for starlings.

The tail seems a bit long for starlings... my guess would be Brewer's blackbirds, as they also form large flocks during the winter.

Difficult to see any detail but Starlings tend to form huge flocks in winter.