The things you learn by chance.
I was going to make a comment about the interesting behaviour of a Blue Jay here at work, when I went to look up a picture on wikipedia I discovered the Blue Jay doesn’t have a natural home range in this area. Nope, no California in the green area, and there are a lot of what I thought of as Blue Jays around here.
Instead it’s a very similar bird called the Western Scrub Jay. Who knew?I sure didn’t. They look very similar to me.
The Western Scrub Jay
Looking at them side by side you can tell, but, hey, they’re not side by side out in the quad area at work. (-:
Anyhow, the whole reason this began. I was walking between buildings and noticed on of the “Scrub Jays” with a peanut in it’s beak. It had found/made a hole in the grass large enough to hide the peanut in. So as I walked passed I was watching this Scrub Jay trying to work the peanut into the ground when it saw me, stopped what it was doing, (peanut buried at this point) and waited till I was about 30 feet away or so, grabbed the peanut out of the ground, moved about 5 feet over and reburied it.
I guess the silly bird was thinking that I knew where it’s stash was, so it moved it. Anyhow, I thought that was kind of cool. What’s interesting is to think about how many nuts are buried in the area. There are a lot of Scrub Jays around here. Something to think about.
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January 11, 2012 at 5:06 AM
Dad
A lot of people in Wash. State think the Stellar Jay is a “Blue Jay’.
January 21, 2012 at 7:00 AM
Catherine Sunter
The bottom photo looks like our chaffinch in shape just a different colour and the top is typical of our Jays (which are related to the crow family I think) and again ours are a different colour. (UK bird life) I love the colour of the blue jay.
Not being able to see Roberta’s blogs any more I do hope she and the rest of your family are keeping well.
January 23, 2012 at 2:10 PM
icehawk55
Catherine,
Roberta took both blogs down. I think she’s in a hunker down mode right now. Not sure if/when she’s going to start writing again. I’m not doing much writing lately either, so I guess I’m not one to talk. (-:
January 26, 2012 at 7:51 PM
Eileen
Actually saw a scrub jay while visiting Monterey, and didn’t know what it was – looks *very* different from a blue jay, actually – although I might be more familiar than most, having raised two orphaned blue jays from babyhood. Blue jays are very pretty (and considerably larger than scrub jays, if the scrub jay I saw was representative), but I hope that scrub jays are a bit brighter and nicer – blue jays are rather dim and relatively nasty birds.
Love to you both and to the girls…