BOAT-TAILED GRACKLE 335 



CASSIDIX MEXICANUS MEXICANUS (Gmclin) 



Boat-Tailed Grackle 



Contributed by Alexander F. Skutch 

 HABITS 



[Author's note: In recent years, according to the A. 0. U. Check- 

 List. (1957) the races of Cassidix mexicanus have been spreading slowly 

 northward. Phillips (1950) reported a specimen of the typical race 

 from Cameron County, Tex., and we can suppose that in time others 

 will reach southern Texas.] 



In Costa Kica the boat-tailed grackle appears to be confined to 

 the Pacific coast, where it forages among the mangrove swamps, and 

 is quite unknown in the interior. But in northern Central America 

 and southern Mexico it spreads over most of the country, and to 

 the local inhabitants is one of the best-known of feathered creatures. 

 Most other birds of the region are given only general or family names; 

 chorcha must suffice for many kinds of orioles, and carpintero 

 does service for a great variety of woodpeckers. The familiar grackle 

 not only bears a specific name, but male and female are honored with 

 distinct titles. The big handsome, yellow-eyed males, clad in sleek 

 black plumage glossed with violet and blue, are called clarineros 

 (trumpeters); the much smaller females, soberly attired in shades of 

 brown, are known to everyone as sanates. And well may the boat- 

 tailed grackles have two names, for more than any other bird of 

 northern Central America, they seek the neighborhood of man. The 

 palm trees of the town plaza are their favorite nesting place; in the 

 evening one sees them streaming in noisy flocks from the surrounding 

 fields, where they forage during the day, to the village shade trees, 

 where they roost. They abound in the coastal towns; and the stirring 

 whistled screech of the clarinero at once recalls to my memory some 

 palm-shaded Caribbean port; but they are scarcely less numerous in 

 the interior, and in Guatemala frequent the towns of the central 

 plateau, up to at least 7,000 feet above the level of the sea. They 

 are equally at home in the most humid districts of the Atlantic 

 littoral and amid the cacti and thorny scrub of the scorching, semi- 

 desert regions of the interior and of the Pacific plain. But they are 

 never found amid the forest. 



But I have never remained longer than necessary in the towns, 

 and only at Alsacia Plantation did I live on intimate terms with the 

 grackles. The plantation house stood on the upturned end of a 

 sharp spur jutting out from the mountains which form the boundary 

 between Guatemala and Honduras into the level Valley of the Rio 



