"A GRACKLE WITH
SOMEBODY ELSE'S HEAD"
Speaking of bird similarities, last week when I
took our four visitors from Washington State along the reservoir they got very excited
about seeing a bird I've thought of as a "weed bird" for so long that when I
spotted it I didn't even think of pointing it out to them. It was a Groove-billed Ani,
shown below:
Anis are largish, all-black birds with long, round- pointed tails. "They look like
grackles with somebody else's head," one of the visitors said, and that's right. In
this area one becomes so accustomed to seeing and hearing raucous Great-tailed Grackles,
which are the same size and all-black like anis, that the more subdued anis can be
overlooked -- even though they're common, too.
As you can see in the above picture that the attention-getting thing about a
Groove-billed Ani is its short but very thick, curved-topped bill which is longitudinally
furrowed with "grooves." The grooves are easy to see if the light is just right
-- which it isn't in the photo. I have no idea how these grooves benefit the bird. The
un-grooved Smooth-billed Ani of southern Florida and the Caribbean gets along perfectly
well without them.
Despite their similar black color and size, anis aren't closely related to grackles. In
fact, anis are members of a completely different bird order, the Cuckoo Order, which
besides anis also holds cuckoos and roadrunners. Two features uniting anis with cuckoos
and roadrunners are these:
- They all have long tails with outer feathers that are shorter
than the inner, giving the tail tip a rounded look.
- They all have zygodactyl feet -- with two
toes pointing forward and two behind -- instead of the typical songbird manner of having
three toes forward and one backward.
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