In a past century I was once a park ranger and I worked a shift at the
visitor center. A pair of brewers blackbirds seemed to randomly attack
people that came up the main visitor center walkway, they dived on some but
not others. Being a bunch of bored naturalists, we soon found the pattern,
the blackbirds went after people wearing red. In fact we began to place bets
among ourselves as to at which "marker" the approaching visitors would get
dive bombed. For a brief time we had a trend that men got dived upon further
out, but this trend did not hold over time. But the color thing did hold,
and while occasionally people with no red got dived upon, nobody wearing red
escaped a pass. One day a guy in a bright red shirt was sent running into
the VC from their energetic attacks with scolding. We tried to find
information as to why the color red seemed to attract their attention, but
this was in the stone ages before the internet, and even now, I still have
no good idea why they responded to a particular color.

Rob Sandelin
Naturalist, Writer
Snohomish County, WA