Approximately 20 tricolored blackbirds have been reported from Payette County, Idaho.  Four birds were first observed on March 26, 2023 at one location and subsequent survey efforts turned up additional birds at a second location about 5 miles away.  Both male and female birds have been observed.

This is the first time the species has been documented to occur in Idaho.

Updates on the status of these birds can be found here: https://ebird.org/alert/rba/US-ID-075.

The 2022 Tricolored Blackbird Statewide Survey was conducted from April 15 to April 17, 2022.

A total of 36 county coordinators and 112 participants surveyed 894 sites in 44 counties.

The best estimate of the statewide population where multiple estimates of the same sites are averaged is 218,000, with a minimum estimate 183,000 and a maximum estimate 261,000 (all figures rounded to the nearest 1,000). 

A total of 733 locations surveyed was unoccupied, and 161 locations were occupied by at least one bird.

The 2022 Tricolored Blackbird Statewide Survey will be conducted April 15-17.  This is the first statewide survey, which is usually conducted every three years, conducted since 2017 due to the pandemic and pandemic-related travel restrictions on participants.

2021 Southern California Survey: Results

From April 2 to April 4, 2021, 14 participants, coordinated by Drs. Anita Hayworth and Rose Cook, surveyed 87 known tricolored blackbird colony locations in 5 counties in the 2021 Tricolored Blackbird Southern California Survey.  The 5 counties surveyed were Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura.

An article by Dick Erickson, Horacio de la Cueva, and Enrique Zamora-Hernandez in the journal Western Birds documents the steep decline in abundance and contraction of the range of the tricolored blackbird in the southernmost portion of its range in northern Baja California, Mexico.  The authors found that fewer birds nested in fewer colonies in 2019 than at the turn of the 21st Century, with but a single colony consisting of about 150 breeding birds documented in 2019.  These effects were believed due to persistent drought, rising temperatures, and agricultural intensification.

In response to the Governor of California's order to address an unprecedented threat to public health and safety, and taking into consideration the responses to a query of County Coordinators, the 2020 Tricolored Blackbird Statewide Survey has been cancelled and will be rescheduled for next year.

On August 15, 2019 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a finding that listing the tricolored blackbird under the U.S. Endangered Species Act was not warranted.

On March 18, 2019 the California Office of Administrative Law added the Tricolored Blackbird to the list of Threatened birds under the California Endangered Species Act.

An article describing the biology and conservation of tricolored blackbirds was published in the Spring, 2019 issue of Cornell University's Living Bird Magazine.  The article, written by author Ben Goldfarb, highlights the unique biology of the species, the history of efforts to study it, the threats to its survival, and the work of the Tricolored Blackbird Working Group to conserve it.  You can read the on-line version of the article here.