FORT SILL, Okla. (April 14, 2016) -- When I met my son and his wife in San Antonio last week, he asked me about some very noisy blackbirds. "They sound like squeaky machinery," he said. I knew just which ones he was talking about.

They're the big glossy ones with the long wedge-shaped tails that we see in Southwest Oklahoma: great-tailed grackles.

The yellow-eyed males have an interesting array of squeaks, buzzes, crackles and high-pitched squawks that sound like alien transmissions from outer space, or an electrical malfunction. At least that's what it sounds like to me. One grackle singing is amazing (or irritating) enough, but put them together in a roost and it can sound like bedlam.

Male great-tailed grackles show off for the ladies by spreading that tail and fluffing their feathers while grackling, which is an onomatopoeic made-up word that fits.

People who have visited the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts may have seen a cousin, the boat-tailed grackle. The males of both species are iridescent black with long tails bent into a "V," giving the appearance of a keel. The brown females are smaller, without the distinctive wedge tail. Boat-tails have a different song, albeit equally noisy, and are smaller. We won't see them in our area since they prefer saltwater marshes.

The other noisy blackbird common in our area is the European starling.

It's Shakespeare's fault that they're even here. Apparently his American fans wanted birds mentioned in his plays to populate the New World, so in the 1890s they released 100 of them in New York's Central Park. These interlopers have spread far and wide, usurping native birds from nesting cavities.

In summer these stocky birds with yellow bills are a glossy black with small spots; in winter the spots are bigger. Their grazing habitat is similar to that of the grackles, and they probe the ground as they walk, giving them a jerky sort of gait. Many people find the starling's song irritating, with its squeaks, whistles and scratchy rasps. Their nests are irritating, too, if they find a hole in your home's eaves.

Even "pest" birds like the starling have something admirable about them. Sometimes you just have to have an appreciation for atonal music.

Or not.