Introducing Bowie

 On July first I wrote a post about my situation at home with various birds making a mess kicking up Stan's dry cat food onto the patio. That activity has settled down immensely. Back then I also wrote...

Long ago Google figured out my interest in birds and I'm constantly reminded of this on YouTube. For several months now they have assisted in turning my attention toward Corvidae, corvids, more specifically, ravens and crows. I am particularly fascinated by the intelligence of these two families of birds.

As it turns out, I have my own "pet" corvid now. She's a California Scrub Jay, also known as a Western Scrub Jay, scientific name, Aphelocoma californica. Her name, given by me is, Bowie. While I always suspected Bowie was a female her name wasn't meant to be gender specific but was rather a reference to the shape of her beak, she has a curved or bowed beak. At least that was my first impression. Bowie has been a backyard visitor for about a year now. Every time she would show up and I tried to grab my camera, she'd be gone upon my return or she was simply inaccessible to my viewfinder while she avoided me inside the ficus trees which surround my patio. I never got a really good look at her beak until I took my first pictures of her back in September. There were a few occasions before that where I did searches for scrub jays with "curved" or "bent" beaks. It wasn't until I searched "deformed beak" that it all came together. I discovered this study at the USGS, Alaska Science Center, Beak Deformities in Landbirds. Then I looked a lot closer at Bowie's beak. The curve is in her lower mandible presumably due to growing up with a drastically shortened upper mandible. 

See...

I contacted the USGS via this web page, Beak Deformity and Banded Bird Observation Report, to submit information on Bowie, got an error and ended up sending info and a couple of images via email instead. I got a response thanking me and saying that my report would be entered in their database back on September 21st but see no evidence of that online. There's a multimedia section with photos of 39 birds here. 

Despite some scientific curiosity, overall I'm not so sure I want to know why this is happening. My speculation steers me toward human causes and quite honestly I've had enough of that knowledge in my life. Bowie's a special bird for me here and now and despite whatever anthropomorphic attributions I might be applying, Bowie is my friend.  

It took me awhile to finally decide to write this story partly based on my wanting to have more images, until last week when I discovered I had taken 770 photos of Bowie and her partner. Mostly Bowie. As of this post I have 881 images in Bowie's folder. 

These images are going in by order of date taken. At the beginning, in September, she was going through her annual molt. While a little scruffy, I think it makes her all the more charming. Here's Bowie...

This is the image first submitted to the USGS project, taken September 19, 2021.

These are from September 24th.

October 5th.

October 13th.

When she eats she needs to put her beak down almost completely on its left side. I set up a feeding area on the patio table when I noticed she would kick kibble out of Stan's dish onto the patio to enable this. She's quite effective at getting more than one piece of dry cat food in her beak. These were also taken on October 13th.

Bowie had gotten more and more accepting of my presence over the course of these photographs. She also became quite aware that I was responsible for the food she was eating. Her mate, Mr. Bowie (don't get confused, Bowie's name is Bowie, she's not Mrs. or Ms. Bowie) has not been especially trusting of me and photos were much fewer and far between. According to the National Audubon Society, "pairs typically stay together all year on their permanent territory." This is the first decent image I took of Mr. Bowie on October 13th. He's a handsome lad and as you can see his beak is quite normal.

 

 

Mr. Bowie again on October 30th.

 
On November 2nd it seemed I had a communication breakthrough with Bowie. On October 24th in anticipation of much needed rain the following day (we got .54") I put down wildflower seed throughout the property. Since then we've had several days of temperatures into the low 90ºs which meant I had to go outside with some frequency (as many as 4x daily) and dampen the ground with a hose and hand sprayer. Bowie must've taken note of this and since I was also cleaning and refilling the little birdbath (thank you Docken!) which hangs on one of the ficus she frequents, she became pretty darn vocal about it on November 2nd. The birdbath is near the east side of the yard, I always start spraying on the west side. On this occasion she squawked at me all the way to my cleaning and filling the birdbath. She was telling me to hurry up! As soon as I walked away from it she was in there having a grand old time. I rushed inside to grab my camera.

Two days later I was able to catch Mr. Bowie at the birdbath drinking and Bowie once again dining on the patio table.

That's all for now but I suspect there will be another post or two about Bowie and her activities here. I hope she sticks around. Also according to Audubon... "Mostly a permanent resident. May disperse some distance in winter, especially in dry years when the oaks produce poor acorn crops." Okay, later, I gotta go look for some acorns.