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[Editor’s note: This is the second half of a two-part story on the red-winged blackbird.]
The brown-streaked females select a patch of vegetation, often over water, in which they construct deep nests that eventually contain four to six eggs of striking beauty. The base color is pale bluish-white, and the eggs are marked all over with squiggles, dots and lines of intense black — as black as the male’s feathers.
Thoreau called these markings “hieroglyphics” and wondered who could translate the markings. “It is always writing of the same character and much diversified,” he wrote.
Enter a marsh where redwings are nesting, and the male immediately tells you of his mate’s nest near-* by by fluttering over your head, displaying his red shoulders and uttering his scold notes.
At times, he appears close to an attack but it doesn’t happen; it is all menace and threat. Other male redwings join the chorus of complaint until the air is filled with their cries and flurries of black and red feathers.
Male redwings are so aggressive on breeding territory that they attack birds much larger than themselves. Ravens, hawks and ospreys that dare to fly over redwing home territory are fearlessly attacked. One male was observed landing on the back of a crow and pecking with fury.
I once watched as a vul
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