Inattentive dog
watering hole unguarded
hello, camp robber
gray jay
Twofer Tuesday: Gray Jay edition
One of the friendliest bird species out there, here are two Gray Jays at our campsite in Mueller State Park. I know they have a reputation as “camp robbers,” but I enjoyed their presence and was glad whenever I had another sighting or heard them making their assortment of sounds off in a tree somewhere.
October 19, 2022
While running on the trails one morning, I nearly had to come to a full stop to avoid running over a jay in the middle of the trail. Not even my 9,000-feet-elevation huffing and puffing could scare it away.
A friendly and self-assured species, those Gray Jays.
The Jay formerly known as Gray
I took this photo at our campsite last month and just now when I went to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology site to verify my identification (Gray Jay), learned that Gray Jays are a thing of the past. In 2018, the American Ornithological Society voted to change the name from Gray Jay to Canada Jay.
What else did I learn?
“The Canada Jay stores large quantities of food for later use. It uses sticky saliva to glue small food items to tree branches above the height of the eventual snow line.”
Now that’s thinking ahead!
Tracy Abell 