Hi Tweets

Sandy and Jerry Converse write:

>We still haven't found where it's
>main hangout is--if it has one.

It probably does. Gonna follow it? If necessary, you can set up a human
chain of observers with cell-phones (as happened here once when a search was
organised for a nest of Anna's Hummingbird Calypte anna, which has *yet* to
be found in Vancouver BC). If its route doesn't take it into deep woods,
having people using their cars as blinds can let the bird go about its biz
unaware that it's under surveillance. But for heaven's sakes, let your
neighbors and the local cops know what you're doing! They'll think you're
five bricks short of a fireplace, but who cares? Maybe you can even enlist
them (hey, birding cops! *there's* an idea! --they're outside a lot, they're
trained to have reliable memories, be good observers and give in clear and
accurate reports--cops would make *great* birders!). On non-breeding
territory, Blue Jay (BLJA) Cyanocitta cristata usually likes a core area,
sometimes quite small, and often in the vicinity of a feeder or feeders.

Champion skulkers, sneaks and slinkers, though: worse than mockingbirds--so,
when you think they might be gone from the area, they might actually be
close by, hidden. They sometimes spend a lot of time near the ground in
dense shrubbery while you're looking up in the trees and wondering where the
heck it's gone.

Besides being great mimics, BLJA has a call that sounds exactly like the
quiet, muted phones in dentists' or government offices, the kind with that
fluting double-ring 'toolooloo-toolooloo'. In the 1980's, they were
considered virtually accidental here in Vancouver BC, so the birders here
would chase any that showed up. One winter in the mid-80's, a BLJA hung
around a small patch of woods near the river south of Vancouver, in an area
where there were some fishing-boats and a houseboat or two moored up in this
little slough beside the woodlot and the best way to locate it was that
double-flute call.

I was walking around looking for it one morning when I realised I was
hearing, not the bird's double call, which was the usual way people located
it, but an actual phone from the houseboat, and that that phone was *very*
busy. Aha! *That's* what's keeping the bird in the vicinity, that damned
phone that someone's calling every five minutes! The jay's been fooled into
thinking there's *another* BLJA here, and it's spent all winter trying to
find it.

So, then I started wondering why anyone would have such a busy phone in a
tucked-away moorage like that. Well, one of the classic ways to smuggle dope
into the area is to offload the stuff onto a fishing boat, then bring it
into a little backwater marina and truck it out from there. That suddenly
explained the presence of a fairly high concentration of bikers and other
rude boys travelling up and down the little road beside the woodlot and
their inexplicable fascination with the finer points of fishing-boat design--

Silly me, I thought they might have been there for the *birding*--

Michael Price A brave world, Sir,
Vancouver BC Canada full of religion, knavery and change;
mprice at mindlink.net we shall shortly see better days.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)