A good number of people don't care for Blue Jays. I'm not one of them. They are a great bird to have around. I love their various calls. One of them is a familiar call I hear when I go out for walks in the fall. I hear the call and it announces to me that fall is here. That's my association of course. That's what makes it fun.
The Blue Jay is related to the Crow. They both are in the Corvid (Corvidae) family. Very intelligent birds. One day I watched a jay fly from the deck with a peanut. He flew off not far from the deck to an area under some mature trees. He hopped on the snow until he found just the right spot to bury the peanut. He dug his hole with his beak and peanut and then proceeded to cover the peanut with snow. The jay then hopped up to a branch of something, wild raspberry plant or something, and found an old dried leaf that was still attached to the vine. He grabbed the leaf and struggled a bit to pull it off the vine. Once he pulled the leaf off, he flew down to where the peanut was. The jay placed the leaf over the peanut, pushed down on the leaf to securely place it and proceeded to push snow over the leaf. Neat!
And yes, they do remember where they put them. On another day, I watched a jay fly in from the marsh. He lit on a tree and looked down on the ground. He jumped off the branch and onto the ground. He hopped around in an area no larger than a foot. With three attempts of brushing snow aside he finally found his buried peanut and enjoyed his buried treasure up in a tree. Pretty interesting stuff.
I love how the background turned out on this one!
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