Getting Acquainted with the Local Corvids

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The Corvid  (Corvidae) family of birds is a huge one, with representation throughout the world.  Crows, ravens, magpies, jays, jackdaws and so many others and all smart as a whip.   For that matter, scientists rank their brain- to-body-size right up there with chimps and cetaceans.  Which is part of what makes them such entertaining birds to get to know.

On the Cape, I loved my crows, and often wrote about the antics of a few well-known family groups that lived around the bog where I walked daily.  I loved their sidelong glances when slipping behind trees to hide the whereabouts of their nest,  or their ability to go from making a ceaseless racket when they found some poor hawk in their area to being as silent as the grave when they were nesting. 

 I loved watching their morning and evening commute to and from the roosting area.  They took up their stations, practically with a Starbucks in hand, just as I was getting to the bog myself.  So, I miss them here in Texas.  Oh, there are crows in Texas, and ravens too, but it’s a big place and there just don’t happen to be any in my neck of the woods.

However, I do have Scrub jays, quite a few of them for that matter, for this year their nesting efforts were clearly successful, and they seem worth getting to know.  Just the other day, when I was walking the dog, a group of jays set up a huge row.  Now, I am used to the Blue jays of the East doing that all the time.  If a predator is near they go ballistic.  This group was carrying on in such a thick patch of junipers that I couldn’t get a good look at what was happening.  And then, in preparation for writing this, I went on- line to read what I could about their behavior and now I wonder if I possibly had missed out on a Scrub jay “funeral”.

A researcher at UC Davis, a Ms. Ingleseus, studied the California subspecies of Scrub jay, who amusingly is said to be more laid back than the species that inhabits the interior,(Aphelocoma woodhouseii)  and found they are anything but laid back when they discover a “crime scene” where the victim is one of their own.  Then they are said to set up a ruckus that brings in all the other Scrub jays in the area and the wild lament is on.  It can last up to 30 minutes! Wow!  I wonder if somewhere in that clump of junipers there lay a cold corpse of a jay? 

These Scrub jays are also the kind to cache food, which I can attest to as I watch them transferring seed from the feeder to trees, to spots on the ground etc.  My husband used to get so angry at the Blue jays in our Cape yard that would take the food from the feeder and hammer it into the windowsills.  Luckily, with stucco and rock as the basic home building material around here, I haven’t seen them doing that yet.

The other thing researchers noticed was that they would cache and re-cache food if they thought another jay was watching and then hide it one last time when they were finally alone.  That sort of devious thinking is only thought to be present in chimps and ourselves. 

So, perhaps I will have to crash through that brush someday to see if there is indeed, remnants of jay there.  Or could it just have been a family of young jays that, although they have left the nest, can’t get over not being fed their “three-squares” a day. There seems to be a lot of that going around in my yard.  But, that’s a blog for another day. 

Meanwhile, there will be squawking here if someone doesn’t get going on one of the three squares expected to come forth from my own kitchen-till another day then.