[EBB Sightings] quiet returns

Greetings Birders:

After several days of almost continuous jay squawking, relative silence has returned to my Berkeley Hills neighborhood.? My posting about all that commotion brought a most interesting response from Alan Krakauer who is a post-doc at the Patricelli Lab at UC Davis(Dept. of Evolution and Ecology)? He says one of his colleagues is studying "cacophonous aggregations" among shrub jays similar to the better known 'magpie funerals' -- a group response to seeing a dead jay on the ground.  My question to him was whether Steller's Jays also take part in this ritual because both jay species were equally agitated.  I must say that I am glad the 'wake' is over.  Like them or not (and I've been distressed at times seeing them attack and kill smaller birds) jays are remarkably clever birds (see Judith Dunham's recent post from the UC Botanical Garden about jay's convincing mimicking of both Red-tailed and Cooper's Hawks).

Within the last several days there have been reported early arrivals of Hermit Thrushes and before that -- Ruby-crowned Kinglets.  For almost 40 years I've recorded the arrival dates of Golden-crowned Sparrows in upper Strawberry Canyon (north fork).  Although arrival now would be the earliest for my records, seems like I'd better start making my early morning rounds.

--Phila Rogers?