For the past few days, a fledgling Western Scrub Jay has been hanging out in the bottlebrush just outside my office window. It has been pretty fun to watch this bird get used to the world at large.
A lot of time is spent screeching for its parents who make frequent visits to the bottlebrush to deliver food items. I can always tell when one parent is getting close because the screeching gets much louder and more intense as the parent approaches. Both adults visit this bush a lot, and I have not seen them take food anywhere else, so I suspect this youngster outside my window is their only fledgling this year. Hearing the screeching over even this short period of time has been interesting because the bird has been getting better at it. Each day, this young jay is sounding less and less like a young and inexperienced bird, and more and more like a normal, adult Western Scrub Jay. It is cool to be able to actually hear the practice paying off.
While it waits for it parents to bring it food, the young bird with its greyer and fluffier feathers, spends a good bit of time jumping from branch to branch within the bush. It has a bit of an obstacle course set up for itself as it bounces around and around in circles all covered by the protective foliage of the plant. As it moves around, it does some practice flapping and a lot of very precise movements as it improves it fine motor control. It also is practicing hunting. When it sees an insect or other potential prey in or around the bush, it jumps after it and attempts to catch it. It is sometimes successful, but usually these successes are made against pretty easy to catch animals. It did really well catching a snail.
It and I did have one funny interaction. Most of the time, I am sitting at my desk and the bird does not seem aware of me at all. At one point, however, it saw something on the glass or at the edge of the window and flew right to it perching on one of the small dividers between panes of glass. When it landed, clinging with just the tips of its toes rather awkwardly it pauses a moment and looked through the glass and into the room. That is when it saw me and was very surprised indeed! Whatever brought it over to the window in the first place was forgotten as the jay jumped right back into the bottlebrush. It certainly learned that there are humans in the world!
Hopefully, this young bird continues to improve its skills and makes it through its first winter (the hardest part of a birds life) and can teach its own young some of the valuable lessons it is learning.
abirdingnaturalist 