A Favorite Backyard Bird

     Blue jays are my favorite backyard birds.  They have beautiful blue plumages, trimmed in black and white, are of a size that one can readily see them, and bold.  And I like to hear them call "jay, jay" anytime of year, but particularly in the crisp, wild weather of fall. 
     Blue jays have livened our yard in New Holland continually for the 27 years I have lived there.  Not the same birds, but a family and their descendants through all those years. 
     The blue of jays' feathering is most striking in autumn when those birds flash here and there among red and warm-brown pin oak leaves to pick acorns, one at a time, and fly away with them in their beaks to poke them in crevices in bark or push them into the ground.  Back and forth, back and forth, and in and out of the trees every day for several days the jays work at storing those nuts for winter use, competing with squirrels for that food all the while.
     One or two pairs of blue jays have nested in our neighborhood all the years I lived there.  A couple of times in as many years I noticed parent jays feeding their young that just fledged their nests somewhere nearby.  One morning I saw a parent jay feeding its chick in a large pussy willow bush right outside our bedroom window.  That was a thrill to me. 
     I have never seen one of their well-hidden nests in our neighborhood until the early summer of 2014.  But I don't look for them either, so as to not disturb the parent birds.  But one afternoon that summer, I unsuspectingly walked by an eight foot tall red juniper tree that sprouted in our yard from a seed in a bird dropping.  Suddenly, a jay shouted at me.  I looked up and saw the jay on the edge of its nursery.  I quickly got away from the tree so as to not disturb the jay further.  And sure enough, they raised a few chicks in that little cradle in the juniper.
     I remembered earlier that spring, a pair of blue jays courting and calling to each other for some time one sunny afternoon in our yard.  And one of the jays was feeding the other one.  All those actions were those of courting blue jays.
     Blue jays are related to other types of jays, and crows and ravens in the corvidae family.  All those related birds can be loud and bold in their searches for food and guarding their territories from others of their respective kinds, one of the reasons they are so noticeable and interesting.
     Blue jays that nest in Canada, New England and other northern states migrate south in October.  But I believe "our" jays are permanent residents in our part of town.  Those residents are here in winter when they are lovely in the snow.  They also come to bird feeders where their beauties and actions are admired by those interested in seeing birds.
     Blue jays will eat most anything from invertebrates in the warmer months to seeds, nuts and berries in winter.  They also consume the eggs and nestlings of smaller birds whenever they find them, scavenge dead creatures, and will kill house sparrows with repeated blows to the sparrows' heads with their strong beaks.  Jays, like their crow relatives, can be predatory at times. 
     But blue jays are attractive to see, interesting around our homes and eat lots of insects.  They are worth watching in suburban areas and woods where they live the year around in this area.