Agelaius phoeniceus
The red-winged blackbird is a passerine bird of the family Icteridae found in most of North America and much of Central America. It breeds from Alaska and Newfoundland south to Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico, and Guatemala, with isolated populations in western El Salvador, northwestern Honduras, and northwestern Costa Rica. It may winter as far north as Pennsylvania and British Columbia, but northern populations are generally migratory, moving south to Mexico and the Southern United States.

Chuck Homler, Focus On Wildlife · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Also called
- red-winged blackbirdPBDB
- Sits inside
- AgelaiusPBDB
- Diet
- insectivore, frugivorePBDB, for Icteridae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Icteridae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Icteridae
Time the record covers
At least 1.7 million years on record.
The record covers at least 1.8 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 4.7 Mya to 0 Mya.
19 occurrences of Agelaius phoeniceus on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
19 occurrences- Pliocene3%
- Pleistocene91%
- Holocene5%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
3 formations
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The named rock units Agelaius phoeniceus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 16 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Agelaius phoeniceus and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Agelaius phoeniceus and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
802 taxa- Colaptes auratus12 sites
- Podilymbus podiceps12 sites
- Fulica americana9 sites
- Rallus limicola9 sites
- Buteo jamaicensis8 sites
- Falco sparverius8 sites
- Meleagris gallopavo8 sites
- Odocoileus virginianus8 sites
- Porzana carolina8 sites
- Zenaida macroura8 sites
- Anas crecca7 sites
- Corvus brachyrhynchos7 sites
- Equus7 sites
- Melospiza melodia7 sites
- Scalopus aquaticus7 sites
- Spatula clypeata7 sites
- Aenocyon dirus6 sites
- Anas6 sites
- Aythya collaris6 sites
- Branta canadensis6 sites
- Colinus virginianus6 sites
- Dasypus bellus6 sites
- Erethizon dorsatum6 sites
- Hemiauchenia macrocephala6 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 19 sites for Agelaius phoeniceus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
17 references- Terminal Pleistocene–Holocene Avifauna of San Miguel and Santa Rosa Islands: Identifications of Previously Unidentified Avian Remains Recovered from Fossil Sites and Prehistoric Cave Deposits2
- Avian community, climate, and sea-level changes in the Plio-Pleistocene of the Florida Peninsula2
- New Record of Capybara (Rodentia: Caviidae: Hydrochoerinae) from the Pleistocene of San Diego County, California with Remarks on Their Biogeography and Dispersal in the Pleistocene of Western North America1
- Holocene vertebrates from a dry cave on Eleuthera Island, Commonwealth of The Bahamas1
- Late Pleistocene passerine birds from Sonora, Mexico1
- Avian material from Rancho del Oro, a Pleistocene locality in San Diego County, California1
- The early and middle Pleistocene avifauna from Porcupine Cave1
- Two new late Blancan avifaunas from Florida and the extinction of wetland birds in the Plio-Pleistocene1
- Quaternary vertebrate localities of Virginia and their avian and mammalian fauna1
- The late Pleistocene (Rancholabrean) avifauna of Little Box Elder Cave, Wyoming1
- The Clark's Cave bone deposit and the Late Pleistocene paleoecology of the central Appalachian Mountains of Virginia1
- Pleistocene birds from American Falls, Idaho1
Each of the 19 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 5 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content2
Picture of Agelaius phoeniceus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Chuck Homler, Focus On Wildlife
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itAgelaius through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1766)