Pájaro Graznido — Squawk Bird

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Written By Drift Mag

Every night from April to October, hundreds of people crowd onto the Congress Avenue bridge to watch the Mexican free-tailed bats swirl into the sky at sunset. A large black bat sculpture rotates slowly in front of the Yeti storefront across the street, and the touristy shops up and down Congress sell bat-themed shirts, bags and earrings. 

There's another black-winged Austinite that doesn't cash in on this widespread approval: Grackles. These omnipresent and loud brown-black birds are widely considered a nuisance. Like bats, they make their homes in an urban environment. The Texas Breeding Bird Atlas names their common nesting sites as small trees, shrubs and roadside plantings. People can also see grackles lurking by picnic tables and takeout windows, launching themselves at spilled milkshakes and unattended fries. 

Grackles’ heads and necks are a dusty yellow-brown, and the rest of their feathers, though iridescent when examined closely, are disheveled enough their beauty goes overlooked. Cornell Lab's bird identification website classifies their typical song as a, “ guttural readle-eak," while Dan Mennill's Bird Songs of the Yucatan Peninsula identifies their most common vocalization as a, "rapid sputtering which sounds like the firing of a machine gun." In a 2021 article for Texas Highways, novelist Edward Carey said their call seems man-made, artificial and sounds like, “the loud and unwelcome shrieks of rusty machinery." 

These scratchy, screeching vocalizations are as much a part of Austin's auditory landscape as the low hum of I-35 traffic. During the 2021 Cap10k race, a runner in a gigantic, unwieldy bird costume blocked traffic in the middle of the road, clutching an electric scooter with a sign that read "Grackle." This costume, which aligns grackles with the everpresent Lyft/Bird scooters Austin natives tend to loathe, demonstrates a common attitude toward grackles: they're everywhere, unwelcome and they represent an intrusion into the imagined Austin of the past. 

UT professor and sculptor David Deming created a larger-than-life homage to grackles in his 1983 piece, Mystic Raven. The piece, which is considered the first contemporary monumental public sculpture in downtown Austin, was originally commissioned for a plaza off of Congress Avenue and Ninth Street. After an agreement with the Contemporary Austin, the city of Austin and the Pease Park conservancy, it was eventually installed inside of Pease Park.

 At 22 feet and nearly 12,000 pounds, it looms impressively over its viewers. The base of it is three black pillars and the top of the sculpture, which uses smaller structures and sweeping lines, points towards grackles’ speed and flight. The piece, Deming said, combines, "the spirit of a bird," with an abstract depiction of a human figure. 

When Deming began work on Mystic Raven, he said Austin was, “going through a growth spurt.” He observed people flocking to Austin, fleeing cold northern winters for the central Texas heat. 

"There were crows and grackles all over the place,” Deming said. “They'd get into your garbage at night. So they were on my mind — Not that they were a menace, but that they were there." 

The Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act was created to protect native birds, but the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has also stated a permit is not required to control grackles when they are considered a nuisance. 

In a representative post on the Texas Bowhunter website, user Jaybo31 wrote, "Kill em all. Personally I have never seen one that wasn't a [pain in the ass]! I hate those noisy *** things." 

Although grackles are seen as an annoyance, it is arguable they are intruders. In a 2018 column from Texas Escapes, columnist Clay Coppedge said humans actually bred them for their iridescent feathers around six hundred years ago. In what ornithologists point to as the first instance of humans intentionally relocating wild animals, the Aztec emperor Ahuitzotl brought grackles back from the Mexican lowlands to live in cities alongside humans. Their habitat gradually expanded, and grackles have been living in Texas since before Texas was a state. 

When grackles descend upon Austin in the fall, it can feel like we're the recipients of an unwelcome migration. Deming described the snowbird phenomenon of, "people leaving the cold north to go to the central South." In fact, it's the opposite— after escaping to the North and Midwest during Austin's brutal summer, the grackles are simply coming home. 

Written by Maya Landers                                                                                                          Photos by Cheney Stephenson and Rushton Skinner
Drift Mag https://www.driftmagazineatx.com
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