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How anyone can possibly resist a bird that has been called Whiskey Jack is beyond my comprehension.  And Whiskey Jack is just one of the nicknames that has been applied to Perisoreus canadensis.  Others include Camp Robber, Lumberjack, and Moose-Bird.  The bold gray-and-white birds know what humans are good for and that is as a source [...]

On Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles’ famous 1967 album,  there is an odd song called “Blue Jay Way” which was written by George Harrison while he waited for Derek Taylor, who got lost trying to meet Harrison in the hills above Los Angeles on a foggy night.  The song is called “Blue Jay Way” because that [...]

For such a large country, the United States has a shockingly low number of endemic bird species, perhaps only 15 in the contiguous 48 states. Equally shocking is the idea that two of those species are scrub-jays! Most corvids are eminently adaptable. Certainly, jays like Blue, Gray, and Steller’s rule their respective domains through teamwork, [...]

The Western Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma california) is a non-migratory member of the Corvidae family found in scrub and dry woodlands of oaks and piñon pine from Washington to Baja California. They are omnivorous and opportunistic feeders, taking mostly arthropods and fruit in the spring and summer and nuts like acorn and pine in the fall and [...]

Georg Wilhelm Steller was never in the Rockies in the first place. Also, he has been dead for more than 250 years now. Many of the species that he introduced to European science are also dead (Steller’s Sea Cow), threatened (Steller’s Sea Lion, Steller’s Eider), or have never been seen again (Steller’s Sea Ape, which [...]

While birding the east slope of the Andes in Ecuador one bird that was relatively common was the Inca Jay, a bird that was until recently considered merely an interesting population of Green Jays by all of the listing authorities.  But in 2009, the International Ornithological Congress* split the Inca Jay Cyanocorax yncas from the [...]

Of all the birds one can see in southern California there is one that is a bit more special than the rest. The Island Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma insularis) is that bird. Not just because it has a larger bill and brighter, more intense colors than the everyday Western Scrub-Jay, but because it only can be found [...]