Steller's Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri)

Description: Adults: Head and neck all around, and back sooty black, touched with streaks of cerulean blue on forehead, and pale gray on chin and blue on wings and tail; terminal portion of tail and wings crossed with fine black bars, sharply on secondaries and tertials, faintly or not at all on greater coverts. Their bills and feet are black. Blue Jays are about the same size as a robin. Young: birds are more extensively sooty and wing bars are faint or wanting.

Range/ Habitat: Pacific coast from southern California to Alaska; resident and breeding throughout it's range.

Diet: In the fall, winter, and spring their food consists largely of acorns, chestnut, berries, seeds, grain, insect, lizards etc., but during the summer months the destroy and devour a great many eggs and young of the smaller birds, their taste for which, being so great that they are known to watch a nest until the full compliment of eggs is laid before making their theft.

Nesting: Their nests consist of a bulky mass of fine twigs thickly plastered centrally with mud and lined with fine rootlets placed 6 to 30 feet high in evergreen tree thickets or near the edge of a clearing. They lay 3 to 5 eggs, usually 4, are pale bluish green, uniformly but moderately spotted with olive brown and pale rufous and with numerous shell markings of lavender. Usually laid from April to May.