Californian Tricolored Blackbird on Downward Spiral

Populations of the tricolored blackbird found in California continue to plunge, now numbering about a mere 145,000 in the state, a survey released Wednesday shows.

Over the last several years, this species, mostly found in California's Central Valley, has been in a statewide downward spiral as a result of farming, and scientists worry that this year's drought will only exacerbate the situation.

"The tricolored blackbird population is not a stable one. It is rapidly declining," Bob Meese, avian ecologist with the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy, told the Sacramento Bee.

Meese conducted the survey with Audubon California, the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

According to their survey, the tricolored blackbird population has plunged 44 percent since 2011, from 260,000 to 145,000 birds.

Declines are being seen throughout the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, and as far south as Riverside County. Meese and fellow researchers, as Californians, see it as their job to protect this imperiled animal.

"It's our responsibility because it's our bird," he said, according to the Associated Press (AP). "We're going to have to take an all-hands-on-deck approach."

Californian blackbirds - distinguished by red feathers in thier shoulder patch, with a bright white stripe - used to number in the millions. But due to harvesting of feed crops on dairy farms where these birds have come to nest, scientists worry that they are becoming endangered, according to the Sacramento Bee. Even worse, they fear that they will share the same fate as two other colonial bird species - the extinct passenger pigeon, which researchers are currently working to revive, and the Carolina parakeet.

And this survey, researchers note, does not accurately reflect how much the current drought is affecting the tricolored blackbird, which historically nested in wetlands, the AP reported.

Meese is currently working with landowners in Yolo and Yuba counties to provide habitat for the birds. He is also in talks with the University of California, Merced, to provide a nesting reserve for them at the Central California campus.