Mean Birds

Some birds—in particular jays and magpies—can be buttholes.

Once, as I stood at my bay window, I observed a doe mule deer strutting across the prairie in front of my house.  The deer suddenly stopped cold as I watched.  She tilted her ears forward peering off in the distance.  Following her gaze, I spotted a magpie flying across the prairie at deer level, aiming directly toward the doe.  Just to be mean, the magpie held course.   The deer was forced to quite literally drop to the ground and allow the magpie to swoosh directly overtop her.

The magpie buzzed that deer simply to be naughty.

For a couple years I kept bird feeders at my house.  The feeders quickly attracted crossbills, goldfinch, pine siskin, western tanager, chickadees, and a host of other birds.

I very much enjoyed the birds.  The chickadees were quite friendly.  I soon had those eating seeds from my hand.  Sometimes, they would follow me from tree to tree as I walked among the scattered pines below my house.

I would still feed the birds today, but for pinion jays.  Pinion jays, for those unfamiliar, are robin-sized and powder blue.  They are quite bold.  Pinion jays travel in marauding hordes, squawking like crows the whole time.  Once the jays found my feeders, they set upon them every morning and every evening.  They came in like a bunch of rowdy teenage boys on a sugar high.  They squabbled at the feeders and set them to swinging wildly.  They chased each other about.  They spilled all of the seeds to the ground.  At times, more than fifty jays would crash against my naturally landscaped yard and stay until the feeders were empty.

So much for feeding the songbirds.

Yesterday, I witnessed another incident of jays being mean.  While at my cabin in the dense woods at the base of the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains, a flash of motion caught my eye.  A Steller’s jay vaulted into the thick boughs of a fir tree just outside the windows of my cabin.  The boughs were heavily festooned with old man’s beard.

A great deal on commotion occurred within the branches of the tree.  Pretty soon, a camp robber (grey jay) popped out of the branches and flapped off to another tree.  A second later, a chickadee fluttered free and ascended to higher branches.  Immediately following that, a squirrel ejected from the boughs and ran down the base of the tree to take shelter in flush of fall colors in the understory.

I have no idea what that mixed crew was doing in the tree.  But once the Steller’s jay had forced the other critters from the tree, it hopped around among the branches for a few seconds in something equivalent to a victory lap and then flew off—apparently sated that the crew was broken up.

     

--Mitchell Hegman

PHOTO: Stellar's Jay (Wikipedia)