Stories from the Farm

annoying to listen to!

Western Scrub Jay babies 🙂

We have been listening to their horrible screeching for a week now.  Their nest was on the hillside across the road, but now they have left the nest and like the trees behind our bedroom…especially early in the morning!  I didn’t appreciate their ‘wake up call’ until I saw the parents pulling wasp nests off the eaves of the house and eating the larvae, I found that I can live with the noise.

It has been fun watching them and the interactions between the adults and the babies.

There are 3 babies and even though they look like adults, they certainly act like babies.

Anytime the adult comes near them, they throw their wings out and open their mouths and scream for food.  Last night we saw the adults showing the babies how to forage for bugs in the grass, sometimes they would feed them and other times they would fly off.  Tonight they weren’t feeding them at all.  They were showing them where the food was, but that was it.

Tonight’s dinner was catfood…glad the senior cat’s expensive food is going to a good cause – ha!  This is one of the adults.  They would grab a piece and then fly off.

The babies were left to fend for themselves.  The look on their faces was priceless…

and then they started begging from each other.

I did a little search on Wikipedia to find out more about this little blue bird and was amazed, they have found they are the only non-primate shown to plan ahead for the future.  They can also remember locations of over 200 food caches!