New World blackbirds that pry food with powered bills
Icterids—the New World blackbird family Icteridae—pack 108 species into 30 genera of often vivid passerines. Most wear black brightened by yellow, orange, or red. Their Greek-via-Latin name means roughly "jaundiced ones," nodding to those yellow feathers, and they are only distant cousins of Old World blackbirds and orioles.
The group covers blackbirds, New World orioles, bobolinks, meadowlarks, grackles, cowbirds, oropendolas, and caciques. Do not confuse Icteridae with Icteriidae, a 2017 family holding only the yellow-breasted chat. Nicholas Vigors coined the group as subfamily Icterina in 1825 inside the starlings; a 2019 passerine phylogeny places Icteridae sister to Icteriidae, that pair sister to New World warblers.
Size and sex differences are extreme for songbirds. Male great-tailed grackles can outweigh females by about sixty percent. Orchard oriole females average roughly fifteen centimetres and eighteen grams; Amazonian oropendola males reach about fifty-two centimetres and five hundred fifty grams—wider span than any other living passerine family. A shared trick is active gaping: the skull lets them force the bill open against resistance to expose hidden food. Oropendolas and caciques pry fruit skins; seed-crushers like cowbirds and bobolinks wear stubbier bills; Jamaican blackbirds work bark niches elsewhere filled by woodcreepers; orioles take nectar.
Breeding density peaks in Colombia and southern Mexico; habitats range from scrub and swamp to forest and savanna. Temperate nesters such as red-winged blackbirds migrate into Mexico and Central America. Nests include hanging woven baskets; some colonies hold up to a hundred thousand birds. Certain cowbirds parasitize other nests. Red-wingeds can devastate rice, with 1994 California control costs cited at thirty dollars an acre, while island forms and California's tricolored blackbird face habitat loss.
Source: Icterid
