We’re talking mass hysteria here.
A photographer by the name of Steve Creek got some interesting photos of a female red-winged blackbird and a scissor-tailed flycatcher. The female red-winged blackbird is incubating the brood, tolerating the flycatcher, feeding the chicks…but then the flycatcher goes to feed the chicks!
Now, I’m a lover and not a hater, but I have my doubts if this pairing can work long term or if it’s a true pairing. What could be going on?
1. Did these bird truly engage in a love so taboo I dare not speak it’s name? Doubtful.
2. Is there really a male red-winged blackbird nearby but is so busy wooing the ladies in the neighboring territory he doesn’t pay attention to how broken his pair bond seems to be? Doubtful, you would think that if he saw that flycatcher near the nest he would dive bomb the crap out of it.
3. Has this female mated with a male red-wing and then he got nailed by a Cooper’s hawk and she’s left to raise the brood on her own and the flycatcher has also lost a mate but the urge to feed young is so strong that its happy to feed red-winged blackbird brood (this is speculation why some birds respond strongly to pishing certain times of year). Who knows?
Regardless, it’s a cool observation.
Can you please explain to (us) – me anyway – why this is such a strange thing? The birds share habitat & diet, right? They are/are not usually at odds with each other? Has anyone had a look at the young (from the bits of beak showing in one shot they looked too young to tell anyway)? Is it impossible that the two would not / could not breed? Sorry – the flycatcher isn’t a bird that makes it this far north, so I don’t know it at all. Hope these aren’t proverbially stupid questions…
My vote goes to #3. Kinda like dogs mothering fawns and such. I’m still amazed that the mother redwing would allow another species so close to her kids, though maybe she’s as befuddled by the whole business as we are (and grateful to have a nanny).
Just to let everyone know. The male scissortail was nearby also. I have not been around these birds in a week now but am going to check on them this morning.
Hi, Fran,
Despite overlap in size, range, habitat, and diet, Scissor-tailed Flycatchers and Red-winged Blackbirds are about as closely related as lemurs and humans. Though it’s not impossible that members of these two species would go against their instincts to form a pair bond (stranger things have happened!), their genetic codes would be so mismatched that there would be no chance of a hybrid embryo being formed. That’s not to say that the female might not lay fertile eggs, but it would have to be from “getting a little on the side” with a member of her own species.
Cool pics, Steve!
Birds don’t read the books…
If I had’na seen it, I would’na believed it.
I tend to agree with sheri, that we’re seeing the chick-rearing instinct in overdrive.
Its gotten to the point where I’m not sure if this happened on the net or if I was talking to my mom about it, but there was a similar situation involving a wren with a favored nesting location it came back to every year and some sparrows that took over the box. The wren kept trying to scare the sparrows off and vice versa but eventually the sparrows just gave up and the wren started coming in to feed their babies—it really couldn’t attract its own mate because it was defending the already in use territory but was so hard wired to feed babies in the preferred nesting site that it got a little confused.