The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay, formerly the Western Scrub-Jay and hopefully soon renamed Arizona Scrub-Jay

December 20, 2023

Never cry wolf, they say.  The scrub-jays, however, pay no mind to the famous adage.  This morning, the jays careen into the feeders as one of the blue darts screeches shreeenk, shreeenk, shreeenk.  The other birds explode, juncos and thrushes and doves beating the air with their wings and scattering to the trees and sky.  All except the jays.

I’ve seen this many times.  But it wasn’t until I read about it in Lixing Sun’s The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars that I understood what was going on.  The jays are sounding the alarm—like shouting Cooper’s hawk!—and clearing the feeders of their competition for sunflower seeds.

Clever beasties.  Clever...until it isn’t.  The other day I found a neat pile of shiny azure feathers in the yard.  Which reminded me what happened to the boy who cried wolf in Aesop’s fable. 

The brown sparrow crowned with rufous.

After an absence of two years, the magical Canyon Wren has returned to the Big Yard.

In the lull between the shell-shocking jays, I take note of the quiet birds.  Several are new for the month.  A surprise rufous-crown sparrow materializes at the fountain just after I ask myself, “Where are the rufous-crowned sparrows?”  The bird remains in the shadows, skipping over rocks until it reaches the pool.  Then it launches itself to a branch and gives me a backward glance before vanishing.

I hear the canyon wren before I see it, a clear, ringing buzz with an elongated vowel, jeeeet.  A phainopepla calls from high in the elderberry, a plaintive whoit? that I mimic without the question mark.

It’s a morning to hear the birds.

            When the scrub-jays muscle in again, even the coatis take note from my neighbor’s alligator juniper, where a troop has been foraging on berries the color and taste of gin.

Unlike Raccoons and Ringtails, which it is related to, the Coati is active during the day.

The coatis also take note of my progress on the vineyard, which now awaits the arrival of the vines in March.

Happy Solstice! I’m off with the wife and kids/grandkids to Dana Point, California, for the holidays…shorebirds to come!