Hi Tweets,

There's a small but noticeable southbound migration of Steller's Jays
through Cascadia each Fall, but I can't ever remember seeing anything on
them heading back north.

On Sunday 4/14, just outside the MacMillan Planetarium in the Kitsilano area
of Vancouver BC a flock of 8 moved northward through the trees. I'm pretty
sure these were migrants because though I've lived in the area for years,
I've never seen nesting or wintering Steller's there, and there was just a
migration 'feel' to them in the way they moved along the row of trees.

All these years, I've not bothered to watch the Steller's Jays in spring
when I begin to hear them calling again, taking for granted that the calling
birds were local residents being noisily territorial instead that these
maybe northbound migrants. Didn't occur to me that if they migrate south,
they gotta migrate north too, and in Spring just treated them as another
wallpaper species. Another species which could use some scrutiny to separate
the migrational component from the resident population (I have a hunch that
a proportion would be Interior-race 'annectens' with the white face and
forehead). Live and learn.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net