File:Purple Grackle.jpg

English: Quiscalus quiscula quiscula (Linnaeus, 1758) - male purple grackle in Newark, Ohio, USA. (photo by Mary Ellen St. John)

The striking iridescent head & neck are beautiful, as are the intense yellow eyes of this bird.

The purple grackle is a subspecies of the common grackle. Hybrids between the purple and bronze races (Quiscalus quiscula versicolor) have been reported in the Appalachians of eastern America. The purple grackle has a strikingly beautiful iridescent head & neck, which contrast with the intensely yellow-colored eyes.

Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Aves, Passeriformes, Icteridae

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Birds are small to large, warm-blooded, egg-laying, feathered, bipedal vertebrates capable of powered flight (although some are secondarily flightless). Many scientists characterize birds as dinosaurs, but this is consequence of the physical structure of evolutionary diagrams. Birds aren’t dinosaurs. They’re birds. The logic & rationale that some use to justify statements such as “birds are dinosaurs” is the same logic & rationale that results in saying “vertebrates are echinoderms”. Well, no one says the latter. No one should say the former, either.

However, birds are evolutionarily derived from theropod dinosaurs. Birds first appeared in the Triassic or Jurassic, depending on which avian paleontologist you ask. They inhabit a wide variety of terrestrial and surface marine environments, and exhibit considerable variation in behaviors and diets.