Baby Steller's Jay

[NV Whino]

Last edited Sun Jun 5, 2016, 04:13 PM - Edit history (1)

Taken while standing in my bathtub, having removed the screen from the window. There were three of them and they fledged shortly after I took this photo.
[url=https://flic.kr/p/GWFfSY][img][/img][/url][url=https://flic.kr/p/GWFfSY]

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. That is a great photo! Wow.

[elleng]

2. :hug:

(Does one hug a Baby Stellar Jay???)

[NV Whino]

3. I think a small pat on the tuft might be more appropriate.

[elleng]

4. OK, Whino.

Consider it done!

[mnhtnbb]

5. That is so cool!

We had a nest of baby cardinals right by our front door this spring. When we were packing to go to the beach a couple of weeks ago,
I was carrying some stuff out to the car and one of the babies was in the middle of our walkway! It was in the sun
and looking stressed. I ran in to get my garden gloves, picked it up, and moved it under the tree where the nest was--in the shade--
and back towards the front deck of the house. No sign of it when we returned from the beach, so I hope it was ok.

[mindfulNJ]

6. Nice shot!

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Steller's Jay -- after Georg Wilhelm Steller

Early scientific visitor to Alaska with Vitus Bering's second (and last) expedition, died on the return trip across Siberia due to disease and the negligence of his Russian guards.

Steller's jay is one of the few species named after Steller that is not currently endangered {or extinct}. In his brief encounter with the bird, Steller was able to deduce that the jay was kin to the American blue jay, a fact which seemed proof that Alaska was indeed part of North America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Steller

A man worth reading about; his Wikipedia entry is fairly concise. He accomplished a lot before his untimely death.

I remember when we took a vacation out West I was excited the first time I spotted a Steller's Jay, because it meant to me we were really 'out West'.

Steller’s Jays have the dubious honor of being one of the most frequently misspelled names in all of bird watching. Up close, the bird’s dazzling mix of azure and blue is certainly stellar, but that’s not how you spell their name. Steller’s Jays were discovered on an Alaskan island in 1741 by Georg Steller, a naturalist on a Russian explorer’s ship. When a scientist officially described the species, in 1788, they named it after him – along with other discoveries including the Steller’s sea lion and Steller’s Sea-Eagle.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Stellers_Jay/lifehistory

Our blue jays here (north AL) seem much darker than I remember from childhood. I've read there is some hybridization going on between Eastern Blue Jays and western Steller's, but can't confirm that is what is happening here.

[NV Whino]

8. Spelling duly corrected

Thanks for the info. I had no idea of the jay's history.

When I moved here over thirty years ago, they used to migrate through. On their way to the Sierras, I guess. Now they are here full time. Just one or two pairs, but it's such a delight to see them. They are so much more polite than the abundant scrub jays.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. I used to have a decorative globe (reproduction) showing NA as part of Asia ...

somewhat like this:



... and so the story of Steller's recognition of this relative of the Eastern Blue Jay (which he had seen in Audobon's paintings) really stuck in my memory.

Of course, I grew up knowing that the two continents were separate, but it was actually centuries after Columbus before this was realized with certainty. For all the coverage of European colonization of the Americas I saw in school, there was very, very little mention of the Russian explorers -- we learned about "Seward's Folly", but that was about it.

Peter the Great, who turned the country into the Russian Empire in 1721, ordered the first instrumental mapping of Russia, and conceived the Great Northern Expedition, which was carried out after the Emperor's death with Vitus Bering as the leader and main organizer. With over 3,000 people directly and indirectly involved, the expedition was one of the largest exploration enterprises in history by its geographic scale and results.[8] Preceded by Bering's first voyage through the Bering Strait in 1728-1729 and the European discovery of Alaska by Ivan Fyodorov and Mikhail Gvozdev in 1732,[9] the achievements of the expedition included the discovery of the Aleutian Islands and the Commander Islands by Bering and Alexei Chirikov, the mapping of most of the Russian Arctic coastline and part of the Pacific coast in 1733–1743 by teams led by Stepan Malygin, Dmitry Ovtsyn, Fyodor Minin, Semyon Chelyuskin, Vasily Pronchischev, Khariton Laptev and Dmitry Laptev.[10] The Academic Squad of the expedition, composed of the early members of the young Russian Academy of Sciences such as Gerhard Friedrich Müller, Johann Georg Gmelin and Stepan Krasheninnikov, inaugurated the first ethnographic, historic, and scientific research into Siberia and Kamchatka.

The Russian colonization of the Americas followed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, through the joint efforts of the state and private enterprises such as the Russian-American Company, led by Grigory Shelikhov, Nikolay Rezanov, Alexander Baranov and others. Russians mapped most of the Alaskan coasts and nearby islands, explored the inner areas of the peninsula, and went as far south as Fort Ross in California.[11]

In 1803–06 the first Russian circumnavigation was led by Ivan Kruzenshtern and Yury Lisyansky, partly with the aim of establishing direct marine communications between Saint Petersburg and Russian America. More Russian circumnavigations followed, notably those led by Otto Kotzebue, Ferdinand Wrangel and Fyodor Litke. These voyages brought multiple discoveries in Alaska and the Pacific. In 1820-1821 a round-the-world expedition led by Faddey Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev on sloops Vostok and Mirny discovered the continent of Antarctica.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_explorers

Of course, it's hard not to suspect a political motivation, but chances are the textbook authors didn't even know this stuff.

[Solly Mack]

10. Sweet!