It seems to be blue jay nookie week. I saw several couples yesterday and today who were working on baby-making. Jays have got to be the most exhibitionistic lovers in the bird world. It's as if they want to be seen getting it on. One spring a pair decided that the rail of my deck was a good spot, and I swear they waited until I looked out the window so they'd have an audience. The male was quite a character, big and dominant, easy to pick out among all the other jays who came to my feeders. I named him Bobo. He bossed everybody around and talked constantly. He had a particularly piercing "squeaky gate" song. (You can hear it at the Cornell Lab page.) I was still trying to manage my feeder birds back in those days, and I was filling one feeder with nothing but safflower seed in order to discourage the starlings. Blue jays dislike safflower, too, but instead of just going to another feeder, Bobo would spend a whole morning flinging the safflower seed onto the ground until he had emptied the bin. He had this slightly scary, "no wire hangers!" intensity about the process. Then he'd perch on the deck rail and yell for a while. He was here for 2 years, and then he disappeared. I miss him.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
4 comments:
Do starlings really get on your feeders? They don't seem interested in ours, thank goodness.
Love the bird posts and the pictures.
The bird posts are great and the pic you chose is wonderful, as always (a light blue bird is quite a sight!)
Bobo The Blue Jay! I love it.
I thought the starlings mobbed everybody's feeders, Bozo. My grandmother was perpetually at war with them. Maybe they're a family curse. ;-)
Blue jays are gorgeous, E--they don't get much respect, because they're so common here, and they have some bullying tendencies, but I just love them.
I really do miss Bobo, Renee. He made me understand why people try to make pets out of wild critters.
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