Brown Headed Cowbird.

This female brown-headed cowbird visited one of my hanging feeders yesterday. In this photograph, the bird retreated to the oak tree in my back yard. I'd already read a little bit about the infamous bird just by reading about other birds. The brown headed cow bird is sometimes mentioned.

"The Brown-headed Cowbird is a stocky blackbird with a fascinating approach to raising its young. Females forgo building nests and instead put all their energy into producing eggs, sometimes more than three dozen a summer. These they lay in the nests of other birds, abandoning their young to foster parents, usually at the expense of at least some of the host’s own chicks. Once confined to the open grasslands of middle North America, cowbirds have surged in numbers and range as humans built towns and cleared woods." - allaboutbirds.org

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