My wife, daughter and I were in Berkeley, CA this weekend visiting my mom and some friends. One morning, while we were having breakfast and watching the visitor to the bird feeders hanging not far from the floor-to-ceiling windows, we witnessed a pretty dramatic event.
A female or juvenile Purple Finch.
As we eat our breakfast, a group of three or four Purple Finches were enjoying their’s. Suddenly, a California Scrub-Jay made an ambush attach on the feeder! It flew in through the branches of the Incense Cedar, and startled the finches into a bit of a panic. One of the Purple Finches (either a female of juvenile bird) made a very bad decision, and flew directly away from the incoming jay which meant it crashed into the big windows right in front of us. The jay flew past the feeder, not stopping at all, and landed on a table near the big windows. It seemed from watching the flight of the jay, that landing on the table had been its plan. The finch was on the deck, stunned by the impact with the window. The jay looked down, watched the finch for a moment to assess its condition, and then jumped down, grabbed the adult finch in its beak and flew away toward a large tree that we are pretty sure this bird and its mate have a nest in! That’s right, as if it was pretending to be one of the small hawks or falcons, the jay picked up the stunned Purple Finch and flew off with it!
California Scrub-Jay
This whole event only took a total of about one minute, but it got us all talking and thinking a fair bit about what we had just seen. First off, What a sight to see! All of us around our breakfast table were pretty surprised, impressed, and a few were taken aback at seeing a predator prey interaction at such close range. Secondly, I have never seen a California Scrub Jay prey on an adult songbird, before! I looked it up, and while there are reports of similar behaviors, they are not common. Thirdly, was driving a finch into the window the jay’s plan? The jay seemed like it was aware of the window, as its movements never put it in any danger of colliding itself. The finch was either unaware of the window, or was so frightened by the jay’s sudden attack that it forgot about it. So, did the jay basically hunt the Purple Finch using a window? Jays, members of the corvid family along with ravens, crows, magpies, and others, are highly intelligent and have been observed using tools in a range of settings. So, using a tool such as a known window location to incapacitate prey certainly seems possible.
Regardless of whether or not the window was used as a hunting tool, or if the jay just got lucky, this was a pretty impressive sight to see. And those baby jays had a very big breakfast of their own that morning!
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