About a month ago, I flew to Austin Tx to catch up with my Boy Child who has been doing some travelling and to attend the MotoGP weekend at COTA.
I arrived at the airport late in the afternoon somewhat weary after a long flight from London. Boy Child had kindly met me at the airport and as we left the terminal building to go across to the rideshare pick up point, two things hit me. The first was the heat! The second was the most bizarre noise I’d heard in a long time. Had I just stepped onto the set of a Star Wars movie? The noise was a cross between a Star Wars droid, radio static and an old rusty squeaky door.
“What the f**k is that?” I asked as I laughed at this weird noise.
Boy Child fell about laughing. “It’s a bird.!
I know they refer to “Weird Austin” but no one mentioned “Weird Austin” birds!
Next day was Thursday, so with a free day ahead of our MotoGP experience, we took an uber from our hotel into the city centre to explore. The driver dropped us at the State Capitol Building and as we walked through the surrounding park, all you could hear every few minutes was the crazy calls of these bizarre birds.
“What is making that racket?” I asked.
“Those,” replied Boy Child pointing to a crow-like bird in the grass ahead of us.
That is in fact a Grackle. A Great-tailed Grackle to be precise and it’s a member of the blackbird family (thanks Google). Despite its looks, its neither a crow nor a jay. It’s a blackbird. Wee Scottish blackbirds sound nothing like their Southern USA cousins, I can tell you!
Austin is full of these birds! Some people love them; some people hate them as they can be aggressive and they scrounge food from everywhere and anywhere. In fact, Austin residents refer to them as “tacoraptors” thanks to their habit of scrounging from the city’s many food trucks.
Me? I fell a little bit in love with these cheeky intelligent birds. Their quirky birdsong made me laugh out loud every time I heard it all week. A bird that makes me laugh can’t be a bad thing. Laughter is good for the soul after all.
If you want to hear for yourself what these guys sound like, there are several sound samples in the article below:
Great-tailed Grackle | Audubon Field Guide
(article sourced via Google- credits to the owner)
Coral McCallum 