Celebrating 2025 Working Lands for Tricolored Blackbirds

Strong farmer and agency partnerships and a new movement study made 2025 a breakthrough year for Tricolored Blackbirds and set the stage for what’s next.

Biologist Ian Souza-Cole holds a boundary marker (for marking nesting Tricolored Blackbird colony boundaries) made of bamboo, duct tape, and brightly colored barricade tape. Photo: Alecia Smith/Audubon.

By Ian Souza-Cole

Working Lands Program Manager, Audubon California

Published December 11, 2025

This article is from Audubon California . Find Audubon near you here.

When nesting Tricolored Blackbirds choose a triticale field on one of the San Joaquin Valley’s working dairy farms, Audubon shows up. And this year, when one adventurous flock broke their usual pattern and settled into a blooming mustard cover crop on an Italian vegetable farm, we were there, too. Since 2014, we’ve traversed the valley to protect every breeding colony we can find, teaming up with farmers and partners to keep nests safe in the middle of busy working lands. This season, we advanced our work to protect these nomadic birds and better understand their movement patterns by tagging them with telemetry devices and adding Motus stations across the landscapes they rely on, letting us follow their journeys with greater precision and opening a whole new window into the life of this near-endemic, state-threatened species.

2025 Wins

Expanded our Motus footprint

In the Central Valley, we added two new Motus stations to the Central Valley at Mendota Wildlife Area and the Tachi Yokut tribe’s Santa Rosa Rancheria.

Tagged 104 Tricolored Blackbirds

Motus detection data is already showing our tagged birds moving up and down the Central Valley from Butte County all the way down to Kern County. This data will provide insights into the seasonal movements and concentrations of these threatene

Protected 21 Tricolored Blackbird colonies

By reaching conservation agreements with farmers in agricultural fields in the San Joaquin Valley, 174,000 adult blackbirds were able to reproduce without risk of losing their nests during harvest operations.

Secured conservation funding through 2029

Funding through the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) with Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to continue advancing Tricolored Blackbird conservation activities in the Central Valley through 2029. The RCPP provides a conservation

Partner Acknowledgement

Looking Ahead

Next year, we’ll install three additional Motus stations and tag more than one hundred additional Tricolored Blackbirds to help strengthen our movement study. With the RCPP support, we will continue protecting all known San Joaquin colonies while expanding our efforts to secure alternative nesting habitats. As part of our initiative to safeguard and increase suitable tricolored nesting areas, we are partnering with the Audubon Conservation Ranching (ACR) team here in the Central Valley to enhance nesting and foraging on rangelands. We are also exploring the feasibility of deploying cover cropping incentives to farmers targeted at attracting blackbird colonies away from dairy grain fields.