Bluejay

Don't see many bluejays around here.   Last fall there were several squawking around the neighborhood like a band of juvenile delinquents trashing mailboxes.   Jays move around a lot and don't come to my feeders.   They prefer fancier food.  And when I hear one, by the time I fetch my binoculars, it's long gone.  Frenetic ADD bird.

Jays are smart.   Last week one lit outside on a branch of the butterfly bush and stayed there for maybe 5 minutes.   Time enough for a pic.

I thought the jay was making like a woodpecker and probing the woody branch for bugs.   Actually as the first photo shows he is holding a pecan between his feet and pecking at it like a pile driver to get at the nut meat.    As I said, smart bird,   The pecan presumably came from my tree 50 feet away or from a neighbor's tree in the next block.    My pecan tree btw sprouted form a nut dropped there by a bird.   I have two more seedling pecans, both volunteer, one of which likely sprouted from a pecan dropped by a bird.

It's said bluejays like peanuts, and if they can crack a pecan, they can sure shell peanuts.    Maybe I'll put put some unshelled peanuts and see what happens.

I have seen them going after ripe grapes on the vine.   I had a good crop of apples this year and didn't see jays molesting the apples.   The fig crop this year was a bust because the plants froze back to the ground.   Some birds go for apples or figs, not sure about jays.

Other pics taken the other day:

These photos were taken through the dirty glass of a storm door, and show glare where a bar was in front of the 70mm objective lens of my Nikkor 300mm telephoto.   Badly underexposed because I had the lens & camera set for a sunny yard and not a shaded one;  one of the shortcomings of using a 1970s vintage lens & teleconverter on a modern digital camera.