Four and 20 Tricolors

Santa Barbara County Tricolor Blackbird Count Shows Slight Increase in Population

A tricolored blackbird in flight | Photo: Tim Hauf

In 1836, British naturalist Thomas Nuttall hiked down from Monterey into Santa Barbara County, picking up botanical samples and birds as he went. One was a tricolored blackbird (Agelaius tricolor), which he shot and brought back to Boston to show his friend John J. Audubon. It was the first tricolor blackbird known to science, and Audubon named it Icterus tricolor — incorrectly placing it in the genus of orioles.

People confuse them with red-winged blackbirds, because of their similarly red epaulets, but tricolors have a white stripe beneath the red — not yellow — and are intensely colonial. Everything they do, they do in groups, including bathing, said avian biologist Robert Meese, PhD, who’s spent the last 30 years studying them. Nest building, copulation, incubating, and brooding is all done in synchronicity. They are the most intensely colonial landbird in North America, 99 percent endemic to California, and slipping away.

The last census found their population had dropped from 394,000 to 218,000 between 2008 and 2022, a 45 percent decline.

Conservationists are doing what they can to shore the bird up, even as supplies of foraging land and wetlands dwindle. The bird was listed as threatened on the California Endangered Species List in 2018, making deliberate takings and disruptions of active colonies illegal. And every three years, a massive statewide survey is launched to track its population. The most recent was held last month, April 18-20. More than a hundred volunteers fanned out to roughly 850 sites between Baja and Siskiyou County, at the Oregon border. From Friday to Sunday, armed with binoculars, sun hats, and pens, this army of biologists and birders inspected every wetland, every cattail and tule pond, and every clump of stinging nettle, Himalayan blackberry, and mustard on private and public property where tricolors have been spotted in recent decades.

Peter Schneekloth coordinated the survey in Santa Barbara County. Each of the 12 volunteer biologist-birders who signed on to help him got a map with red dots marking historical sites they needed to visit. But they went to more that were required, Schneekloth said, because they’re birders, and, well, who knows where those flighty trikes (as they’re nicknamed) might find themselves?

Schneekloth, who’s been a serious birder since his college years, had Lake Los Carneros, Goleta slough, and three spots in New Cuyama on his list. So, at 8 a.m. Friday morning, under a crystal-blue sky, he was scanning the tule beds around the banks of Lake Los Carneros. Minutes passed. A common yellowthroat sang from an oak branch. A western flycatcher made himself known. A raft of coots floated on the water. But no tricolors. Goleta slough was the same. Nothing. Schneekloth had not expected to find any at either site; tricolors have been scarce in Goleta since the 1980s. Still, survey protocol required he check anyway.

Tricolored blackbirds in cattails | Photo: Tim Hauf

Today, the largest colonies that tricolors can convene are in the range of 10,000 to 30,000, and these are almost always in the Central Valley where fields of triticale planted by dairy farmers for feed have turned out to be adequate substitutes for emergent grasses. But for farmers, a colony of 10,000 blackbirds nesting in a feed crop isn’t something to be celebrated. For years, generations of tricolors were lost to the harvesting of such fields in April and May, when females are incubating and brooding nestlings. According to Birds of the World, between 2005 and 2009, nests of roughly 88,000 tricolors were lost each year in silage harvesting. Fortunately, the Natural Resources Conservation Service is now paying farmers to delay harvesting when a colony is present — though DOGE cuts may put an end to this.

They’ve been a part of California’s landscape, and Santa Barbara’s landscape, for thousands of years, probably hundreds of thousands, though there’s no way to document it. In 1933, a colony of 250,000 adult birds was observed by a researcher for the rice industry near Sacramento. Yet he admitted that the estimate was probably “ridiculously low.” One can only imagine the multitudes that once inhabited the estimated four million acres of wetlands that comprised the Central Valley before Europeans arrived, when it was known as an inland sea. Here in Santa Barbara County, according to Paul Lehman’s The Birds of Santa Barbara County, California, in 1914, 1,000 tricolors were counted between Santa Barbara and Carpinteria. A colony of 3,000 was spotted nesting in Los Alamos in 1936. And 5,000 were tallied in the Santa Maria Valley in the winter of 1981. Vandenberg Space Force Base had 1,500 birds breeding in their MOD pond in 1991. And in 2006, a New Cuyama dairy hosted a 6,000-bird colony in one of its fields.

The only other North American colonial landbird one can compared with the tricolor is the Passenger Pigeon — which was hunted into oblivion in the 19th century and extinct by 1914 — because of the historically large colony sizes, and how they were known to block the sun when lifting from a nesting site. | Photo: Cadeo Scott Schipper

But big groups of tricolors are rare in Santa Barbara these days, just as they are rare in Southern California counties such as Los Angeles, San Diego, and Riverside. (The total Southern California population is about 6,200 tricolors.) A combination of commercial and housing development, prolonged drought, and conversion of croplands to vineyards and nut orchards is making the area less and less hospitable to tricolored blackbirds. A mere 75 were found here in 2022. Although in 2017, a cattail pond on UCSB’s Sedgwick Reserve drew the only known colony in our area, a lively settlement of 760.

This year’s survey will show a modest bump in Santa Barbara, according to Schneekloth.

“There’s a little bit of a spot [in the Cuyama Valley] called the Caliente wetlands, where we stumbled onto a colony we guesstimated [was] about 350 birds,” he said. And another site had 40 birds just foraging.

Sedgwick’s cattail pond drew 125 birds this year, but volunteers elsewhere came up empty. “I had a couple of guys covering spots in Santa Maria,” Schneekloth said. “They didn’t find anything. One guy rented a boat, cruised as much of the perimeter of Lake Cachuma as he could, thinking maybe there could be some [birds] hiding out. He didn’t have any luck either.”

Though not fully tallied, the 515 total so far found here could be a harbinger of a comeback or a blip as the species makes its exit from the area. They will tell us which is true, either with cacophonous squawking while they settle into a patch of tall grass or the empty silence of their absence.