{"id":172832,"date":"2026-09-17T06:33:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T12:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=172832"},"modified":"2026-09-17T07:59:32","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:59:32","slug":"woodhouses-scrub-jay-in-my-backyard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/17\/woodhouses-scrub-jay-in-my-backyard\/","title":{"rendered":"Woodhouse’s Scrub Jay In My Backyard"},"content":{"rendered":"

On November 28, 2020 I saw and photographed the first Woodhouse’s Scrub Jay I’d ever seen in my yard. Two days ago I photographed my second one.<\/p>\n

I’d been hearing jays in the neighborhood for a couple of days and the previous day an extended and very noisy interaction between several jays and a Cooper’s Hawk in my neighbor’s huge trees was hard to ignore. But none of them appeared in my yard and I got no photos.<\/p>\n

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But two days ago, while I was photographing California Quail from my patio, this jay suddenly appeared in the snowball bush next to my back fence. I spent 27 minutes with ‘him’ and he spent much of that time trying to figure out how to feed at my cylinder feeder. More about that in a minute.<\/p>\n

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Typical of jays, he made a racket everywhere he went. Which made it ridiculously easy for me to know exactly where he was as he explored my yard and garden.<\/p>\n

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Eventually he discovered the rebar I use as a support pole for my cylinder feeder and assumed a pose that showed off his magnificent blue tail. The red in the background is the amaranth in my garden.<\/p>\n

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He spent a long time trying to determine if there was anything good to eat in that seed cylinder and if so, how to get to it. He tried several times but it seemed like he couldn’t figure out how to get to the cylinder with that red rain-protective ‘lid’ in the way.<\/p>\n

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So he gave up and explored my garden. Here he’s on my pole bean trellis, with his long blue tail sticking through one of the openings in the wire.<\/p>\n

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He flew up to one of the metal posts supporting the trellis and began making enough noise to wake the dead.<\/p>\n

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In this shot it looks like he’s about to poop but he’s just trying to regain his balance after making a quick 180\u00b0 turn on the post.<\/p>\n

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Then he took off and disappeared in the snowball bush again.<\/p>\n

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The next time I saw him he’d landed on my bird bath for a drink. I’m embarrassed by the condition of the bird bath – it’s scummy and most of the water has evaporated. My excuse is that I’ve been working on a huge indoor project for nearly three weeks and the day before I’d forgotten to clean and fill the bird bath. Rest assured, it’s now squeaky clean and full of water.<\/p>\n

In the nearly half hour I spent with him he returned multiple times to the cylinder feeder to try to figure out how to get to the seed. Eventually he realized that he was big enough to…<\/p>\n

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reach the seed from the vertical part of the pole. After this success he returned several times for a snack.<\/p>\n

I always buy the Bug Nut and Berry Cylinders from my friends at Wild Birds Unlimited. Those cylinders contain mealworms, tree nuts, sunflower chips, peanuts, raisins, and cranberries (without the mealworms I’d probably gnaw on that cylinder too).<\/p>\n

Being a jay, he always picked off one of the nuts for his snack and ignored everything else.<\/p>\n

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And he always flew off to a secluded place to enjoy his prize. After eating this nut, he disappeared and I never saw him again.<\/p>\n

After listening to him squawk for 27 minutes, the sudden quiet was almost deafening.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On November 29, 2020 I saw and photographed the first Woodhouse’s Scrub Jay I’d ever seen in my yard. Two days ago I photographed my second one. (11 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,3722],"tags":[7936,7964,311,6965,5386,7965],"class_list":["post-172832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-woodhouses-scrub-jay","tag-bird-bath","tag-bug-nut-and-berry-seed-cylinder","tag-utah-2","tag-wild-birds-unlimited","tag-woodhouses-scrub-jay","tag-yardbird"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-IXC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/woodhouses-scrub-jay-8845-ron-dudley.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172832"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":172885,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172832\/revisions\/172885"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}