A medium-sized, highly social passerine bird native to North and South America. A member of the family Icteridae, it is one of 10 extant species of grackle and is closely related to the boat-tailed grackle and the extinct slender-billed grackle. In the southern United States, it is sometimes simply referred to as 'blackbird' or (erroneously) 'crow' due to its glossy black plumage, and similarly it is often called 'cuervo' ('raven') in some parts of Mexico, although it is not a member of the crow genus Corvus, nor even of the family Corvidae.