Three Blue Feathers

This afternoon I was picking up and bundling brush and branches from some of our trail clearing and garden pruning when I uncovered a blue jay's feather on the ground.  When I looked more closely, I saw that it was in fact two feathers together, most likely wing feathers because of their size and the amount of white on their tips.  Then I noticed a third, smaller feather, possibly from the same place and the same bird.

What had happened?  I worry about the jays and the other birds that we see around our house and grounds, mostly because of the calico cat.  Three feathers don't necessarily equal a dead bird, but they are a sign that something happened.  Part of the problem is our seed feeders.  I fill them up and a couple of jays usually notice pretty quickly, eat their fill, and then call to the other jays to let them know.  Of course the others come from around the neighbourhood – there’s a small gang of a dozen or so, I'd guess – and they eat too.

I’m happy to feed them, along with the chickadees, woodpeckers, juncos, and sparrows, but the jays are big, and they get excited as they feed, and within a day the feeder is empty and there’s seed spread all over the ground under it.  None of the birds, except for the woodpeckers, seem to mind eating off the ground, but unfortunately this is where the calico cat sometimes enters the picture.

This cat, which appears to have our neighbourhood as its private hunting ground by day (I believe the raccoons rule the nighttime), knows to run if it sees me.  After all, I do tend to favour birds over cats in this situation, and any time I have noticed it from the kitchen window stalking the small birds pecking seeds off the ground, I go out.  It takes off as soon as the door opens, because it knows I might be picking up a small rock, but there are so many times I’m not at the kitchen window or out in the yard.

However, jays are corvids, which means that they are smart, like their cousins, the ravens and crows, so I am always hopeful.  I know that the crows aren’t vulnerable, and it’s not just because they don’t come to the feeder.  In fact, they like to gang up on the cat, the same way they’ll chase the raven that sometimes strays here from over by York Redoubt, or an owl if it made the mistake of perching somewhere in their territory.  They call from Irene’s roof to our roof to the big spruce by our driveway to the white pines next to the house and there’s nothing happens around here that the crows don’t seem to know about.  One of my favourite recent moments was looking towards the clamour of crows next door and seeing the calico cat streaking across Jim’s long lawn with three crows dive-bombing it.

So three feathers with their brilliant blue barred with black and white on the tips means I need to watch for a jay with a slightly ragged wing, keep on keeping an eye on the feeder, and continue to hope that the crows are on patrol, the bright-eyed jays are alert, and the calico cat is still stalking in vain.