A Reference Genome for Boat-tailed Grackles (Quiscalus major)

Boat-tailed Grackles (Icteridae: Quiscalus major) are marsh-dwelling blackbirds that are endemic to the eastern United States. They occur along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts from Connecticut to Texas, as well as throughout the Florida peninsula. Various elements of Boat-tailed Grackle biology have been studied extensively, yet genome resources for this and other icterids are few. Here, we provide a contiguous genome assembly constructed from tissues of a museum-vouchered, female Boat-tailed Grackle of the nominate subspecies Quiscalus major major that we collected in southeast Louisiana.