Yellow-headed Blackbird, Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus
Yellow-headed Blackbird, Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus, Male. Photograph taken from within a residential community in the greater Los Cabos area, Baja California Sur, December 2009. Photograph courtesy of Carol Snow, Del Mar, California.
Yellow-headed Blackbird, Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus. Photograph taken in Huatabampo, Sonora, December 2017. Photograph and identification courtesy of David F Smith, Alamos, Sonora.
The Yellow-headed Blackbird, Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus is a member of the Icteridae Family of Troupials and Allies that includes Grackles, New World Blackbirds and Orioles,Blackbirds, that has one hundred five members placed in thirty genera, and the sole global species of the Xanthocephalus Genus. In Mexico they are known as tordo cabeciamarillo and tordo cabeza amarilla.
The Yellow-headed Blackbird is large in stature. They are sexually dimorphic and easily separated. The males are twice as large as the females and have much more intense yellow coloration. The males have a bright yellow head, neck, and break with black body plumage, lores and eye-stripe with prominent white-wing patches visible in flight. The females have pale yellow primaries on the neck, throat and breast and eyebrow stripe with dull black and brown bodies. The males have dark black bills and the females have dull black bills, their iris is dark olive-brown to black, and their legs and feet are dark black.
The majority of Yellow-headed Blackbirds breed in the prairie and mountain meadow wetlands of the western and central United States and Canada. There is a documented breeding population along the Colorado River valley south to Gulf of California and in extreme northeastern Baja California. They make annual diurnal migrations is sex specific large flocks wintering south from mid-September to mid-March from northern Veracruz on the Atlantic slope, Oaxaca and Guerrero in the interior and adjacent slope, and Nayarit on the Pacific slope. Birds found in the southern part of the range are predominately females. In Mexico, distribution restricted primarily to agricultural highlands throughout the central plateau, and they are rarely seen within the coastal lowlands. While in Mexico they forage in open agricultural areas, including grain fields, plowed fields, meadows and pastures feeding on cultivated grains and weed seeds. They are colonial breeders with nests constructed in emergent vegetation of deep-water wetlands. They form communal roosting being highly social and polygynous and foraging flocks with other icterids including Brewer’s Blackbird, Brown-headed Cowbirds, Common Grackles, Red-winged Blackbirds, and Tricolored Blackbirds. They will frequent forest edges for roosting, loafing, or foraging. They have life spans of up to sixteen years.
The Yellow-headed Blackbird is a straightforward identification due to its yellow head coloration.
From a conservation perspective the Yellow-headed Blackbird is currently considered to be of Least Concern with stable populations. They are prone to harassment and killing by farmers as they consume ripe crops. They are also negatively impacted by human development that has reduced the quality and quantities of the wetlands they utilize for breeding. They have been dated to the Late Pleistocene Period, 2.6 million to 12,000 years ago.