Great-tailed Grackle sounds: song and calls

A Great-tailed Grackle sounds like a one-bird junkyard band. The everyday call is a low chut, males add a louder clack, and in the eastern population, which reaches west to central Texas, males also give a striking whistle that climbs in pitch. Around those sits an unusually large vocabulary used all year, from sweet, tinkling notes to a squeal like a rusty gate hinge. If a long-tailed black bird is making that racket in a Texas grocery store parking lot, you have found it.

What the song sounds like

The full song of the eastern birds comes in four parts. It opens with a run of harsh, dry notes that sound like twigs being snapped, softens into a stretch of gentle, rolling notes, goes back to snapping twigs, and finishes with several loud calls of two syllables each.

That song is only the core of a much larger collection. Great-tailed Grackles have an unusually big repertoire, and they use it in every season, winter included. The range runs from sweet, tinkling notes all the way to a grinding squeal like a gate that needs oil. Males use more kinds of sounds than females, which mostly chatter, although there is at least one report of a female singing the territorial song.

Grackles in the West have their own dialect. Birds of the smaller western race, found in California and western Arizona, sing a series of repeated notes that ends on one accented note, often mixed with other repeated phrases, so a grackle in San Diego does not sound quite like one in Houston. In Arizona, where the two western races meet, the birds appear to mix often.

The calls: chut, clack and that whistle

The sound you hear most is the plain call, a low, short chut. Males also give a louder, harder clack. In the eastern population they add a clean, rising whistle, loud and deliberate enough to pass for a person whistling.

Whistles and clucks are the signature of this species, and they are exactly what the closely related Boat-tailed Grackle lacks. All that volume costs the grackle some goodwill: the loud calls are a big part of why some people treat it as a pest.

When and where you hear it

Great-tailed Grackles began in the tropical lowlands of Central and South America and for more than a century they have been moving north. Today they range from Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador up to Minnesota, west to Oregon, Idaho and California and east to Florida, with strays reaching southern Canada. Between 1880 and 2000 their breeding range grew by more than 5,500 percent, following farms and cities.

They live year-round in open country with scattered trees, from farmland to downtown, and they feed on the ground in pastures, wetlands and anywhere else that is clear. Cities suit them very well. In Austin they crowd around food trucks and grocery store parking lots and the bird has become an icon of the University of Texas campus. They will even pick dead insects off the license plates of parked cars. At night they gather in shared roosts in trees or in reeds.

The calls go on all year. Courtship and nesting pick up in spring, with the mating season usually starting in early or mid-April. In Warble the card is common in the Texas, Arizona and Nevada albums and a legendary find in Kansas.

What it looks like

A big, lanky blackbird, larger than a starling and smaller than a crow, about 15 to 18 inches long. The male is black all over with a violet-blue gloss, a bright yellow eye, a heavy, nearly straight bill, a flat crown and a very long tail that he can fold into a deep vertical keel, like the hull of a boat seen from behind. The female is much smaller, brown above and buffy below, with dark stripes at the sides of the throat, the same yellow eye and a shorter tail without the keel. Young birds look like females but have brown eyes and streaked breasts, and young males carry shorter tails and often dark eyes.

Birds that sound similar

• 
  Boat-tailed Grackle

  Listen for whistles. Audubon gives the Boat-tailed's call as a harsh jeeb-jeeb-jeeb-jeeb, without the whistles and clucks of the Great-tailed. The two overlap on the Texas and Louisiana coast, where Boat-tailed adults have dark eyes.

• 
  Common Grackle

  Audubon sums up the Common Grackle's voice as clucks and a sharp, harsh call like a rusty hinge. A Great-tailed does those too, then adds the loud clack and the rising whistle. A Common Grackle also tops out around 13 inches.

Where the Great-tailed Grackle card lives

In Warble the same bird can be an easy card in one state and a prized one in another, because each album ranks its birds by how often people really report them there. The Great-tailed Grackle appears in 7 state albums:

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated October 14, 2026.