While sitting outside yesterday evening, pondering how fast grass can grow
and weeds can go to seed, my husband and I heard one of our local Scrub Jays
throwing a very severe and raucous fit. My husband walked down the side
walk to the tree in our neighbors yard and discovered the reason for all the
noise. He motioned for me to come and take a look. When I looked up into
the tree, there staring back at me was a young and rather harassed raccoon
with a "How did I get myself into this?!" look on its face. It looked like
it was trying to get away from the nerve-racking screaming of the jay, but
had got itself somewhat stuck. Whether there is a nest in this tree or this
is where the new fledglings had set up camp after leaving their nest in our
yard, only twenty or thirty feet away, the raccoon was learning a lesson
about the parenting ethics of western scrub jays. (I have seen our scrub
jays dive bomb the squirrels in the yard, whacking them on the back of the
heads any time the squirrels would go near the nest site or the scrub jays
feeding areas. Thankfully though they have tolerated us moving about in our
yard, the most trouble I have gotten into with them is when I fail to keep
the peanut feeder filled!) All this ruckus even brought a curious crow in
to investigate as well. We wandered back to our jungle, I mean yard, happy
to have had the this entertaining delay to tackling the task looming over
us.

While working on getting our yard back into some semblance of order we were
visited by a well worn adult Black-capped Chickadee showing it's young
one where to find the suet, as well as our male resident Downy Woodpecker
whom we had not seen in several weeks. Bewicks Wren, Caspian Terns, Gull
species, American Robins, and Purple Martins creating an interesting back
ground symphony to work by.

Maurie Kirschner
Olympia WA
mnmkirschner at gmail.com