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The name Rusty Blackbird is misleading, in winter at least. In autumn, a male has rusty edges to his feathers and the female is a rust color all over.
The problem with identification is the Brewer’s Blackbird, which is almost identical to the Rusty except that it has much more iridescence in its plumage. Both birds are the same size and both have yellow eyes.
I made my identification on the fact that the Rusty Blackbird is a distinctly eastern bird; the Brewer’s is a western species. The problem is compounded when one looks at the range maps of the two species and sees that the Brewer’s Blackbird does occult, though rarely, in the Southeast in winter.
Roger Tory Peterson’s “A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America” is always the final word for me. He opens his description of the Brewer’s with: “A western blackbird,*^ and goes on to state that the bird has a whitish eye. The bird Lee and I observed had a distinct and startling yellow eye.
The second visitor, or, I should state, visitors were two female Brown-headed Cowbirds; they did not have the brown heads and greenish bodies that distinguish males.
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