Blue Jay!

This gallery contains 3 photos. On Christmas Eve 2017, I had the fortune of encountering a Blue Jay in Richmond. A common sight in just about every province east of British Columbia (and a particularly iconic bird for Ontario 😉 ), but a rarity here, this feathered celebrity capped off an eventful final two weeks of the year for me: I was able to see three rare birds in Metro Vancouver (Summer Tanager in Vancouver, Mountain Chickadee in Ladner, and this blue-and-white wonder, who was not just an early Christmas gift, but my first encounter with one).

Visiting Blue Jay doing its best impression of a roadrunner (Jan 9, 2018)
f/10, 1/500, 500mm, ISO 2500

Woodward’s Landing Campground has hosted this rarity for a number of weeks now. Conversations with other photographers revealed that this Blue Jay would cache his/her booty in one place, only to have the resident Steller’s Jays raid that same cache a few moments later! How does one intelligent bird outsmart another intelligent bird? Film at eleven …

Blue Jay in a pre-Christmas Day pose (Dec 24, 2017)
f/7.1, 1/500, 500mm, ISO 2500

I was to also learn that the campground caretaker was not aware of the unusual visitor keeping its corvid cousins–the more common Steller’s Jays and the Northwestern Crows–company; instead, it was one sharp-eyed lady who made the initial discovery on December 23. Although it rarely vocalized during our visits (the Steller’s Jays were the talkative ones), with its blue-and-white plumage, it was quite easy to distinguish who was whom. When not caching or eating its peanuts, the Blue Jay would fly to the tops of the trees and survey its domain. More often than not, it would retreat to the trees furthest from the photographers.

How many shades of blue can you wear? At the afternoon feeding (Dec 24, 2017)
f/7.1, 1/500, 500mm, ISO 2500

I always wonder why birds end up thousands of miles out of their typical wintering ranges. Did their internal GPS go awry? Did they sense a very cold winter coming where they usually hang out (Toronto recently experienced the coldest winter they’ve had 57 years — maybe the Blue Jay had the right idea!) Like all jays, Blue Jays are omnivores, but the smaller birds who frequent the area have nothing to worry about this visitor — the campground caretaker has enough bird feeders to feed 50X as many birds as he gets every day (although on our initial encounter, a Sharp-Shinned Hawk flew just a few feet above our heads as it stealthily absconded with a meal that one upset crow was not about to surrender easily). To learn more about the Blue Jay, please visit its Cornell Lab of Ornithology allaboutbirds.org profile.

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