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| Not a Bluebird |
Like many gardeners, I hope that my garden will attract wildlife, mostly in the form of birds. I feed the birds, both the ones who eat seeds, and the ones who sip nectar, and I plant and design my garden with their needs in mind -- shrubs and trees for nesting and sheltering (and birdhouses, which the ingrates ignore), water features for bathing, deep-throated red flowers for hummers, and even though seedheads sometimes look scruffy, I leave lots of them on plants like Echinacea for my seed-eating feathered friends.
I had to learn about a whole new set of birds when we moved here from New England. Here for the first time I encountered Steller's Jays, Varied Thrushes, Anna's and Rufous Hummingbirds, Chestnut-Backed Chickadees, Townsend's Warblers, Western Tanagers, Oregon Juncos, and Evening Grosbeaks.
And, on Memorial Day weekend, while I was in Portland, I saw this bird, twice. Two different birds, a day apart.
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| This bird was exploring the crevices of a Trachycarpus trunk at Lan Su Garden. I've read they like to hide seeds, so it may have been retrieving a cache of food. |
I wondered if it might be a bluebird, since I've never seen one. But when I got back home and looked closely at my photos, and my reference book Birds of Washington State, I found it didn't match any of the pictures of bluebirds. It's a Western Scrub Jay.
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| This jay was doing a very Robin-like hop-pause dance on the lawn outside Union Station, as it searched for food. |
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| Aha! Found something! |
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| Yum! |
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| What are you looking at? |
A learning experience, and a lot of fun to watch and photograph.
I still haven't seen a bluebird. But some day I will.
