Approval

When I was very young, I heard loud bird screeching in the side yard. I hopped off the porch swing and walked around the corner of my house. There, I saw a blue jay swooping and screaming around a young bird on the ground. With all the righteous indignation of a typical 6-year-old, I marched over to save the baby from the Blue Evil, but my good intentions fell away when the jay switched her attention from the baby bird to the top of my head. Blue jays have long sharp beaks, and she applied hers with vigorous force.

I abandoned my mission and ran shrieking back to the front porch, sobbing out my story. That was when I learned from my parents that mama blue jays don't like little naturalists messing with their fledgelings.

It took some years to recover from that trauma, but I managed to forgive the mother bird for her attack.

The blue jays in the Not-So-Big Woods enjoy irritating me in a totally different way. For 3 years, we've been trying to lure them in with offerings of peanuts. For 3 years, they've been indifferent.

Until now.

Choosing carefully. Not all peanuts are equal.

Desperately wanting to carry two nuts at once, but beak capacity is limited.

Suddenly, for no reason that I can find, we've been stamped "APPROVED." A blue jay couple visits every morning, scooping up peanuts both shelled and unshelled. Unlike many other situations I've read about, our jays don't bully the smaller birds, probably because we have so much food available and spread out over a large area. 

Cramming shelled and unshelled nuts at the same time.

Too many nuts in the crop to easily push this one down.

Taking off, fully laden.