The Last Bird

My favorite bird of all time is the Stellers Jay.  The blue jay of the west.  It's a fairly common bird in parts of the west but they are shy and prefer deep woods.  In fact, the only places I've ever seen them had both elevation and trees.  Estes Park, Lost Creek Wilderness, Eleven Mile Canyon, Stratton, and Black Forest are places that stick prominently in my mind for sightings.  They are big birds, abut the size of a crow but lighter bodied.  They have long sapphire blue tails with royal blue barring, they blue fades into a lighter cerulean up the belly before switching completely to a cowl of black feathers covering the head, scaps, breast and mantle.  Each birds has a unique facial marking of irregular white spots on the crown and up into the large crest that rests over their large, bright eyes.  Their thin legs are black as is the bill and the eye ring.  To say the bird is striking is an understatement.  Even in worn plumage a Steller's stands out from any crowd of other large dark birds.  I first saw one in early summer, perched atop the house that I grew up in.  The birds have an interest communal lifestyle arrangement that isn't so different from other corvids.  Pairs breed monogamously for many seasons, the first brood stays on for the next year to help feed the family before joining small flocks of similarly aged immature birds.  Then they pair off and start their own families a few seasons later.  A family group was residing in the wooded ravine that runs through the property adjacent to ours and they would fly out over the prairie looking for berried shrubs, seed, insects, corn, pine nuts, or anything else.  Usually they would fly out in groups of three or four, one on the barn, one on the house looking for hawks while the other two foraged.  One morning the house watch bird was sitting on the corner of the roof outside my bedroom window and it stayed there for a good fifteen minutes, stalking about then jumping on its stick legs, bobbing its head to get a better view of the plain.  Eventually its partner moved on and so did it, crying out to each other as they went.  I was entranced.  I decided to put out a feeder.  I immediately went to the barn and found a shallow, wide rubber water dish that would suffice.  So I took the dish up to my room, opened the window, popped the screen out (which was never returned), and placed the dish on the sloping green roof.  It was too sloped and the dish slid down into the gutter.  I retrieved my dish and then made a very scientific guess as to what angle of board I would need to build a platform for the dish.  I found an old pallet which would work to provide the raw materials.  I ripped the pallet up and a few nails later I had a very rustic looking platform.  Once back on the roof I sat next to the feeder and thought about what wild birds might eat.  Seeds, naturally.  All birds eat seeds, right? But I didn't have any and I didn't need to go to work or otherwise leave the house.  Chickens ate chicken feed as did ducks, geese, and turkeys.  Maybe jays would.  And they did! The next morning all four members of the foraging party were at my feeder filling their crops with chicken feed.  I only got to watch for a minute before I was spotted and off they flew.  I closed the shade so that just a few inches were open for me to watch.  They came back.  And for the next hour they would make regular trips to the feeder and back to the wood.  I was working in the garden center at a Home Depot at the time.  When I left work to return home I had a bag of bird seed and a suet feeder and suet block.  The block had a picture of a jay on it so I figured it must be something they liked.  I watched those birds all summer and I learned as much about them as I could.  Other birds visited my feeder too, goldfinches, scrub jays, a pinyon jay, ravens, crows, a hairy woodpecker, thrushes and purple finch.  I was hooked.  And more than a little obsessed with the Steller's Jays.  I had to learn as much as I could about them and spent many nights hunting information on the internet.  I also bought books about corvids, though these were about the more studied ravens and crows, I figured they had to illuminate the jays a little as well.  I read Dunn and Heinrich and Marzluff.  I broke the spine of that Smithsonian guide and tore out a few pages on accident.  Even now the corvids are my favorite birds to watch and I'm ever vigilant for the piercing, nasally call of a Steller's Jay.

Steller's jay at Pegasus Station