Jay is a bird I get very little opportunity to photograph when I'm out birding. To the best of my knowledge, until this year, we'd only twice ever had a Jay visit our garden. The first time was in June 2015 when I caught an early morning bird on one of the trail cams set to video the Hedgehogs, then the second was actually seeing a bird with my own eyes in June 2016. I was, therefore, delighted to see a Jay visit our garden on 29th May this year - a dull wet day.
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| Jay (Garrulus glandarius) - our garden on 29th May, 2017 |
Three days later, we had another appearance - twice! The attraction was the peanuts that I'd been putting out for the woodpeckers. Earlier in the year I'd managed to drag a sizable bit of a felled tree back to my car. Loading it into the car was even trickier, but I managed eventually having taken half an hour to saw a bit off the end. This was duly installed in the garden and 25 peanut-sized holes drilled in the back of a vaguely horizontal section. Lindsay objected to this monstrosity at first, but her attitude tempered somewhat when we were getting results within 24 hours. |
| Jay - our garden on 1st June 2017 |
The visits increased in frequency over the next few days, and it became apparent that the bird had young in a nest somewhere - I was having to fill the holes up with peanuts every hour when I was at home!  |
| Jay - our garden on 4th June 2017 |
By 5th June, I was beginning to wonder if we had two birds visiting as it seemed that no sooner had the bird gone than it was back again. |
| Jay - our garden on 5th June 2017 |
On 6th June we had confirmation that there were two birds as we saw both on three occasions, although I took no photos that day. It seemed to be that the second bird would fly in and take the place of the first bird. On 7th June I did manage some photos. Although the first two images, below, show birds in exactly the same place on the feeder branch, they were taken just one minute apart. The first shows a bird with shaggy feathers round the upper-leg region and bushy 'crown' either side of the head, whereas the second shows a distinctly sleeker bird. |
| Jay - our garden on 7th June 2017 |
We were, of course, hoping that these birds would bring their youngsters to see us but, sadly, we went away to Scotland for 10 days, two days after those last photos were taken. There was no way that I could arrange for the feeding log to be topped up regularly, but I'd taken the precaution of putting down a ground tray with peanuts for the week before we went, and one of the birds was readily taking nuts from this. Before we went away I bought a large bag of peanuts and left two trays full for them.
When we came back on 18th June, all the peanuts had gone - and so had the Jays. It was rather disappointing.There were no further sightings of Jay until 23rd June, when we had a brief visit. There were then sporadic sightings after that.
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| Jay - our garden on 28th June 2017 |
Our last sighting was on 3rd July.  |
| Jay - our garden on 3rd July 2017 |
I miss the Jays and am keeping my fingers crossed that they might return next year. It was a great privilege to have them visit us so often this year.
OK, so this wasn't the short post I promised, but at least it's nearly all photos! My next post will probably cover our New Forest holiday in July.
Thank you for dropping by.
