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Is scrub jay talk okay here? They're corvids. A pair of scrub jays lives in my small urban yard. I've been making friends with them by sitting out at the same time each day and giving them peanuts. At first, I had to toss them at least three feet away before they'd swoop down to get them, but now they'll come right up to me. Or, rather, the female will come right up to me. I call her JJ, because that's how I call out to her ("Jay, Jay!"), and I'm just very creative like that. When I talk to JJ, she makes little croaking noises back at me. Meanwhile, her mate (whom I call 'Big Blue,' 'cause he's an unusually big and chonky jay and, like I said, I am very creative) will flutter over to sit on a nearby branch of the cherry tree and watch the proceedings suspiciously. The last couple of days, JJ has been nowhere to be seen, and I was getting worried about her. But then today, Big Blue came close to me to accept a peanut for the very first time. Usually the jays bury the peanuts, but this time Big Blue cracked it open right there in front of me, gulped down one of the nuts, and took the other one into the overgrown robinia hedge. He did the same thing with a second nut, and then a few minutes later, he emerged with JJ in tow. Big Blue then retreated up to his usual tree branch while JJ came over to croak for a couple more peanuts before she returned to the hedge. So I guess now I know where their nest is. I wonder if JJ's laid any eggs yet. The internet tells me this is the right time of the year for that to be happening.
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Mar 29, 2020 05:01
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 16:27 |
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Here are some scrub jays displaying their color memory by playing the shell game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4piWGZKIH4 And here is a raven named Fable, solving puzzles and showing off how much smarter she is than scrub jays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE3f2H_5mXU Lychnis fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Mar 29, 2020 |
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Mar 29, 2020 20:32
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Unsinkabear posted:I live in Florida and was loving green with envy about how many people itt seem to be just chilling with scrub jays and thinking nothing of it when they're so rare... turns out there is more than one type of scrub jay, and only ours are a conservation concern! Still jealous, but it's a good thing there are some subtypes of the little guys out there who are doing okay. Aw, yeah. Ours are Western or California scrub jays (they keep changing the name), and they're doing fine. The ones out here seem to adapt very well to urban and suburban living. They're common backyard birds here in Portland. They're so common, in fact, that lots of people don't like them: like all corvids, they can be aggressive and apparently sometimes bully smaller birds at feeders. I never see any jays bothering the flocks of goldfinches I also feed, though - as soon as they figured out they're too big for the finch feeders, they started just completely ignoring them.
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Mar 31, 2020 23:31
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In Yachats, the war is between the crows and the seagulls. They occupy opposite banks of the estuary: big patches of white covering the wet sand on one side of the water, big patches of black covering the sand on the other.
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Apr 1, 2020 03:47
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