A Celebration of Nests

We made it to 100 nests!

The Artemis nest in Coches. This one was built only about face-height in a Scrub Oak, Quercus pacifica.

The Polaris nest. Possibly one of the most ridiculous nests ever. In the history of Scrub Jays. It was only 0.8 meters tall in a tiny, 1-meter high Scrub Oak, in a tiny, less-than-5 meter clump of also tiny Scrub Oaks. Totally exposed. It failed pretty quick.

As I've mentioned before, a major part of our work on the Island Scrub Jay crew is finding and monitoring nests. It takes patience, focus, and a little bit of luck to locate a nest quickly. The nests are easiest to find when they are first building--they carry obvious sticks and clumps of grasses as they fly across open areas into patches of vegetation, sometimes while calling loudly. Despite these conspicuous displays, they are quite sneaky once they enter the vegetation, and they occasionally make multiple stops at different trees and quick changes in direction to throw off observers and/or following predators. At this point, we don't go in and try to find the nest yet because past studies have indicated that finding the nest before they are invested in it may cause them to abandon it (because the jays likely perceive us as nest predators), but we try to wait for multiple material carries to pin down the exact location and mark it in the GPS. 3-6 days later, when they have likely layed their eggs (one a day, up to 5 but usually 3 or 4) and started incubating, we physically locate the nest so we can monitor it every three days. We try to avoid going to the nest as much as possible, so we observe from afar until we presume the nest to have failed.

The Hubble female sitting awkwardly on her nest. This was also a ridiculous nest, completely visible from the east, and low. Surprisingly, they were the first nest on all of our plots to fledge young!

Sometimes I feel like the birds are tricking me by flying in front of my face with a stick and placing it somewhere that is not their nest area. AP/ORK, the Hopsecutioner male, did this to me three times in a row--which would have meant he was building with sticks for 9 days in the same area--but when I went in to look for it, there wasn't even a platform.

My notes in my field notebook about a bizarre stick-carry/trickery that I observed.

The past three years of drought have greatly affected the Jay nesting seasons. Since the project started in 2008, over 100 nests have been found every year until 2013 (an average of 120), which was year two of the drought. Only 66 nests were found in 2013, though we were not physically locating nests that year, so we may have missed a few. Last year, the crew only found 37 nests on two plots (as opposed to three), which is incredibly low even if you add 15 nests for the missing plot...apparently, the birds just didn't try much after their first nest failed. Normally they attempt at least two times and some have attempted up to five times in a season. Naturally, in the fourth year of this incredible California drought, we expected the Jays to give up pretty quick, or not try much at all. Lucky for the birds, they are going nuts. An early winter rain must have been just the thing to amp up their breeding instincts. Usually they start building nests in late February or early March, but we arrived on February 10th and they were already building and possibly had been for weeks. We currently have 3 nests that have successfully fledged young in Coches...we are looking into whether this is the earliest recorded fledge date in the history of the project. Exciting!

Just my backyard. At Sunrise. No biggie.

In celebration of this joyous occasion (and the fact that we still have two more months of the season to find MORE nests) and to celebrate the birthday of one of the Eagle/Peregrine crew---we decided to put on face paint and throw a party!