Hi guys! Eva here. Today I’ll talk about the Steller’s Jay, you have probably seen a lot of them in your backyard! They are very loud and noisy. I like them because they are very pretty, their feathers are blue and black and they have a little feather crest on their heads. Here’s some fun facts about them!

• The Steller’s Jays uses mud to build their nests.
• The Steller’s Jays will come to bird feeders and take peanuts. They will stuff 1-2 peanuts in their crops (a sac in the throat where food is stored for digestion) before they fly away.
• The Steller’s Jays will cache (store in ground)nuts to eat during the winter. They will put a leaf or piece of material to mark the location but forget where they store all of them. Their “forgetfulness” allows the nuts to germinate and grow into young trees.
• Their nests are made of a bunch of tiny sticks stuck together with mud and lined with fine rootlets placed 6 to 30 feet high in evergreen trees. That means their nests could be low enough for an adult to touch to as high up as a three story building.
• They lay about 3 to 5 eggs. The eggs are the color of the light blue sky on a sunny day. Their eggs also have light brown spots on them. Steller’s Jays usually lay their eggs from April to May.
• Steller’s and Blue jays are the only North American jays with crests. The Blue Jay is expanding its range westward. Where they meet, the two species occasionally interbreed and produce hybrids.
• Steller’s Jays were discovered on an Alaskan island in 1741 by George Steller, a naturalist on a Russian explorer’s ship. When a scientist officially described the species, in 1788, they named it after him – along with other discoveries including the Steller’s sea lion and Steller’s Sea-Eagle.

Here’s a picture of a Steller’s Jay.

That concludes this column of Wildlife Talk with Eva Norris! Bye!