London, "John's Bird Restaurant" (my place) has 7 regular Blue Jays that visit daily with a variety of foods to choose from. My choice is to keep them around. Jenny's suggestion to use netting is called "Bird Block" that you can get at Home Depot; it should do the trick! (I use it on the top of potting mix in some containers to keep squirrells from digging). Since they will probably rturn, if you don't want them, use the netting and don't feed them other foods. If you want to keep both the Blue Jays ad the blueberries, use the netting and serve the birds dry cat food, bread, and/or raisins. In an experiement, I saw the Blue Jays went for the dry cat food, raisins, and bread - leaving the blueberries for the Gray Catbirds, Rufous Tohees, Mockingbirds, etc. Jenny, you always have such great info and pics! Thanks so much, although as you know it's impossible to respond to every thread we read and then keep up with all the responses. That would be a full time occupation. LOL. I went all out this spring for the 3 regular Ruby Throated Hummingbirds that have come around for the past 4 years. They are not shy of humans! After planting tons of red Salvia, Canna 'Red King Humbert'(and other Cannas),etc. - plus the nectar feeder I clean every 3 days - not a single humming bird showed up after all my "special efforts". I'm really disappointed.

Leslie, To get full enjoyment of the cedar waxwings, you need to watch them after they've eaten fruit that has fermented over the winter. Let's just say they get tipsy and have trouble walking, much less flying. It is pretty entertaining. Most of the birds we have that I cherish most only really started coming in large numbers in drought years. Once they figured out we were a reliable food and water source, they began visiting regularly. The worst the drought (or the colder the winter weather), the more birds we have. My favorite bird sightings since moving here include the two golden eagles I watched for weeks in the spring and summer of 2004---they finally flew right over our house together one day while our friend, Ken, was here working on the roof of the barn so he got to see them too. I had mostly seen them when I walked the dogs on a road that runs between us and the river, so having them fly right over our place was real convenient. Other favorites are the Chuckwalla's Widow, which you hear more than you see, and the Whip Poor Will---common in our childhood but rare now. The bird we see least on our property but all over the neighborhood, running the roads naturally, is the roadrunner. They can forage for all kinds of food so rarely come here to eat or drink. That means that on the rare occasion a roadrunner is here in the yard eating or drinking, you know that the drought is just about as bad as it possibly can get. We have a lot of wooded acreage and it is full of birds. We get woodpeckers, flickers, nuthatches, brown creepers, phoebes, bluebirds....just all sorts of interesting birds. I've had my fill of snakes for the year already, in or out of trees. Last week I had a close encounter with 3 different snakes, and one of our cats is acting sick and listless as if he was bitten by a venomous snake. For a few days I wasn't sure he was going to make it, but he seemed to show improvement today. The snakes seem terribly prolific this year and I'm not happy about that. Dawn

Hello All, I am new, but I will do what I usually do and jump in with both feet! I am happy that you are a peaceful man, hope that this helps. I don't know of a blue jay repellant, but I can offer some information for you in addition to that already provided by the others. I also came up with a couple of alternative bird you could dislike instead of the jay. One alternative is the Europian Starling, introduced by man, and began to spread over the whole country. They compete aggressively with native birds for nesting. Birds are in enough trouble from of loss of habitat from mankind. (you can prevent them from taking up residence in your birdhouses by making the entrance 1 1/2 " or less so they can't get inside the joint.) The Cowbird is another alternative to bluejay loathing. It sneaks into other bird's nests and lays it's eggs, making the other bird do all the work. The field guide called it parisitizing and the cowbird affects about 144 species altogether and some are threatened with extinction altogether. The cowbird is only doing what it has always done, only we changed the playing field and the combination is lethal. Back to the BlueJay. The jays fly around in courtship flocks in the spring follow the leader style and give a variety of calls. (acording to Stokes Field Guide these flocks are made up of several males and leading the way one female. When they land the males start bobbing raising their whole body up and down, while giving the "toolool" call. Good News, they are quiet during breeding. They also dive bomb hawks giving jay calls. I don't know if a "scarehawk" would work, it would scare off the other birds too and you don't want that. One more thing you could try, is to lure the jay to another area of your yard. The jay eats acorns, nuts, fruit, and it comes to feeders for sunflower seed and cracked corn. You could put sunflower seed (black oil I think) and cracked corn on a feeder away from your window. That might work. Good luck to you, I hope I wasn't too long winded for you all. Happy Birding! Bitsy In the end, I would say the best thing to do is to get some earplugs and find some common ground. You could even learn to not despise the jay.

Hi calliope! Ours here do the SAME thing. I have been seeing groups of 6-8 Blue Jays flying together across the yard, all of them yelling loudly the whole way. I don't think that the behavior is connected to a hawk here. I noticed it last year when the parents fledged their young. They stayed in and around the yard for a long time, and they would engage in this same screaming Blue Jay posse behavior. I'm not sure why they do it though.