The tricolored blackbird (Agelaius tricolor) is a passerine bird of the family Icteridae. Its range is limited to the coastal areas of the Pacific coast of North America, from Northern California in the U.S. (with occasional strays into Oregon), to upper Baja California in Mexico. This highly social and gregarious bird forms the largest colonies of any North American landbird, with a single breeding colony often consisting of tens of thousands of birds. The common name is taken from the male bird's distinctive white stripes underneath their red shoulder patches, or "epaulets", which are visible when the bird is flying or displaying. Despite the similar names, this bird is not related to the Old World common blackbird, which is a thrush (Turdidae). The species' call sounds slightly more nasal than that of the red-wing's - a nasal kip and a sharp check. The male's song is a garbled on-ke-kaaangh. The bird migrates south during the colder seasons to Mexico and back to northern California during the warmer seasons. Taxonomy The tricolored blackbird does not have any officially recognized subspecies, although there is a population in southern California that may require genetic evaluation. Distribution The tricolored blackbird nests in colonies, but scholars disagree on whether the costs outweigh the benefits of these breeding habits. Nonetheless, nesting in colonies makes the tricolor susceptible to environmental changes. Although the tricolor has been able to adapt to some of the landscape changes, habitat loss played a major role in the reduction of its population. The tricolor originally could be found in the marshes of California, nesting in wetland cattails and bulrushes. Scholars have noted a reduction in freshwater marshes as breeding grounds for the tricolored blackbird. Largely, this is due to human activity, and it’s estimated that between the 1930s and 1980s alone, over 95% of wetlands were disappeared. Also in this period, the observed tricolor population saw an 89% reduction, while the average colony size saw a 63% reduction. Altogether, the tricolor population dropped from several million to only a few hundred thousand during the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the tricolor was able to adapt in response to these severe landscape reductions. It began to use both native and non-native vegetation as well as agricultural fields as their breeding and foraging grounds. In the 1930s, over 93% of the tricolor’s colonies were nested in freshwater marshes, but by the early twenty-first century, only 35%