What a jay day!

Val spots an exotic visitor at her garden bird station

- Val Bourne

EXCITEMENT, excitement, and more excitement! We have had a new visitor to the feeding station – a jay feasting on fat balls. I think it’s a young one because it’s slender and frisky. I remember that I was like that once, honest! It bobs over our lawn, looking rather like a green woodpecker when it moves, before flying up and taking a sizable chunk of food at a time. The flash of electric-blue feathers clearly shows, along with a black mustache, although most of the feathers are a warm pinkish-brown.

Jays, handsome and acrobatic members of the crow family, have a wonderful Latin name – Garrulus glandarius. This translates as ‘chattering birds producing acorns’, apparently. One jay can cache up to 5,000 acorns in autumn, if there are plenty around. I’ve often watched jays burying their acorns in the field beyond the cottage, but they also store them in crevices in tree trunks. I’m guessing that most of the acorns in the field near me get eaten during winter because we don’t have a forest of oak saplings springing up in front of the cottage.