Following up on Jane Hadley's post on the WOS archives for scrub-jay expansion. An excellent source of such information summaries is Birds of Washington edited by Terry Wahl, Bill Tweit and Steve Mlodinow. Bill happened to write the account for Western Scrub-jay. I'll just summarize a few points from that book and other sources of info here, but do recommend that people get their hands on the book if interested in summaries of distribution of our birds. As Bill states, they appear to have always been fairly common in extreme SW Washington along the Columbia river and east along the Columbia river. Gabrielson and Jewett (1940) noted this occurence, though Jewett in 1953 noted them as rare permanent residents in extreme SW Washington, indicating that they probably were more common formerly and that would be backed up by the 1940 reference.

The account has first confirmed breeding records for different locations with Olympia being summer of 1990, Enumclaw summer of 1994, Spanaway summer of 1999. Numbers from the Olympia CBC went from 2 in 1989 and remained in the 5 or less category until 1995 with 11 and kept rising with 38 noted in 2000.

Finally, a couple other references:

Sound to Sage a website published and maintained by Seattle Audubon summarizes results from the Breeding Bird Atlases for Island, Kitsap, King and Kittitas. Most of the breeding bird atlas records comes from the 90's and as can you see from the link below, breeding records are scarce.
http://www.soundtosage.org/soundtosage/bird_detail.aspx?id=312&county_id=0

Jane mentioned that the first report in WOS News came "The first mention of the species in WOS newsletters was in the October 1989 issue, which reports that scrub-jays "are present" in Lyle (near the Columbia River). Another mention of scrub-jays in Lyle appeared in the December 1989 issue."

This bears a footnote that WOS was established in 1988 with the first newsletter was in November of 1988 and the October issue is only the third publication of WOS News. Thus, I would revert back to Gabrielson and Jewett that this area was already part of their core range long before the advent of WOS.

So in Western Washington much of the northward expansion in the Puget Sound region occurred in the mid to late 90's and now they seem to be further expanding north and west of that area. In Eastern Washington, expansion happened a bit later and has only pushed hard to into areas like Yakima in the last few years (Yakima is at or near the double digit CBC number now). Reports are beginning to come from Kittitas County as well indicating they've made some push into there as well.

Scott Downes
downess at charter.net
Yakima WA