{"id":1001012,"date":"2008-02-10T11:40:16","date_gmt":"2008-02-10T16:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/birding\/2008\/02\/10\/395-great-tailed-grackle-at-ace-hardware\/"},"modified":"2008-09-03T10:46:14","modified_gmt":"2008-09-03T15:46:14","slug":"395-great-tailed-grackle-at-ace-hardware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/birding\/2008\/02\/10\/395-great-tailed-grackle-at-ace-hardware\/","title":{"rendered":"#395 Great-tailed Grackle at Ace Hardware"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the coll things about moving to a new part of the country is that almost anywhere becomes a potential source for life birds, like these Great-tailed Grackles I found yesterday at the strip mall at the intersection of Culver and Michelson in Irvine:<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/malegrackle.jpg' alt='Great-tailed Grackle male' \/><br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>(Yes, I know these pictures suck. This is what happens when you take pictures of a jet black bird on a bright California afternoon with a consumer grade camera, then discover Photoshop won&#8217;t run on any of the computers you have handy.)<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/femalegrackle.jpg' alt='Great-tailed Grackle female' \/><\/p>\n<p>We had just driven over to replace a few screws the movers had lost, but when we got out of the car there was such a raucous cacophony I thought we might have stumbled on one of California&#8217;s flocks of wild parrots. Instead, we&#8217;d found maybe ten Great-tailed Grackles. These look a lot like the Boat-tailed Grackles I know well from New York, but their calls are very different: more varied and less metallic. They&#8217;re also a little bigger. Finally, there just aren&#8217;t any Boat-tailed Grackles out this way so any large glossy black bird with a long tail and a yellow iris pretty much has to be a Great-tailed Grackle. (Do be careful to distinguish them from the much smaller, shorter-tailed, and even more common Brewer&#8217;s Blackbirds, though. In this parking lot both species were present, so it was trivial to distinguish them by size.)<\/p>\n<p>My California life total (151) is now just one bird short of my New Jersey total (152). If I&#8217;m lucky, maybe today I can find a Greater Roadrunner at the dry cleaners. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the coll things about moving to a new part of the country is that almost anywhere becomes a potential source for life birds, like these Great-tailed Grackles I found yesterday at the strip mall at the intersection of Culver and Michelson in Irvine:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-1001012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birding","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}