A good-looking bird

I'm no bird watcher, but I like to see them and always marvel – if not envy – their lifestyle. When I run in the morning, I pass by an area that has recently been transformed by a colony of beavers into a series of ponds and there, each spring and early summer, I've noticed a beautiful, mid-size black bird with red and an yellow spots on his wings.

I looked up for him and found that he was the male, red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus), a passerine bird found in most of North and much of Central America. According to Wikipedia, it may winter as far north as Pennsylvania and British Columbia, but its northern populations are generally migratory, moving south to Mexico and the southern United States when snow flies.

This bird is also said to be the most abundant and best studied living bird in North America. While the male is handsome, his wife is far less elegant, wearing a nondescript dark brown dress. Both eat seeds and insects and are happy that way.