Goodbye, Baby Jays — Mama Bird’s and Mine
Empty nests are just two new nests in the making.
Papa Jay appeared first, I do believe.
It’s hard to tell with Stellar’s jays, but the male tends to be a bit larger. He would wait patiently on a nearby branch, moving in after the nuthatches flew off to talk excitedly in the nearby birch tree. Only then would he alight awkwardly on the suet block feeder and get his fill.
Next came Mama Jay.
She was a bit smaller, if not daintier. Of the two, she had the louder and more raucous call. A corvid, akin to crows, the call of a stellar’s jay can wake you up in a cold sweat from a sound sleep. Here in the PNW we sometimes refer to them as “murder jays,” simply due to their terror-inducing cry. It literally sounds like someone is being murdered when a group of jays are in conversation.
Within a few weeks, Papa and Mama were inseparable.
I spotted the nest one morning, nestled on top of a cedar bough near the trunk, directly in the line of sight of my second-floor window. A hank of hair, from my son’s last trim, dangled from one side like a decorative tassel. I may even have looked on with a bit of envy at the simplicity of setting up home for a jay — no building codes, regulatory bodies, property ownership. We humans…
