11-25-14 - Jays and Pigeons at Tassajara

If you go to Tassajara in the summer now you may notice the Steller's jays (also known as the long-crested jay, mountain jay, and pine jay - Wikipedia) closely related to blue jays. Mainly we called them blue jays or jays. Steller's jay is a bit of a tongue twister and sounds too academic. They're not a nice bird. They run off the song birds and mainly squawk instead of sing. Here are Steller's jay sounds. Third one down on the calls is the one I remember best.

Because of these aggressive birds it's not wise to eat outside anywhere near the center of Tassajara which is where they tend to congregate, perched on branches around the courtyard waiting for a careless student or guest. Often heard guests complain their lunch has been vandalized. I've seen the jays swoop down and snatch an apple slice out of someone's hand. A few years ago Edward Brown bout had a fit when one hit a sandwich he was eating, got off with some of it, the rest on the ground. They are the reason we eat in a screened in area in the summer - the flies too. We used to talk about how to get rid of them. A farmer from Greenfield said the thing to do is, when they first show up in the spring, shoot one and the rest will fly off and not return. We couldn't do that though some of us would have if allowed. So people have learned to live with them, and in some cases, appreciate them, or submit.

When we first got to Tassajara in 1967, the jays weren't dominant. I don't even remember them from then. Pigeons were. About twenty of them lived there. That was around the time Herb Caen dubbed them "rats with wings" in his famous daily column in the SF Chronicle. I don't know what type of pigeons they were. I bet if I called up Sterling Bunnell he'd remember - just found him on Facebook and sent a message. Yvonne Rand would probably know. She's a birder. They weren't aggressive in the same way as jays but they weren't afraid of us. They'd gather around our feet on the long gone old back deck and eat all the cat food and anything down there. We couldn't leave things out unattended but they wouldn't hop up on a picnic table rudely while we were sitting at it, so we ate outside then. They had a sort of creepy greediness to me.

I found them to be pests when I was running the dining room and decided to get rid of them. I don't think I had to ask anyone due to their general unpopularity but I always shared everything with everyone and always had a million ideas of what should be done so even if I did tell the director, Peter Schneider maybe, he probably just went sure sure hoping I'd go away and not have another bright idea. So one morning after guest breakfast was over and the dining room all clean, I put out a jumbo cardboard box propped up with a stick, holding a string tied to it, a plate of dried cat food inside, and waited. Not long. They were really stupid. One by one caught them all, put them in other large boxes, and before time to set up guest lunch the task was done. After guest lunch cleanup loaded the boxes with all of them in it in the back of the shopping truck and drove them out to Carmel Valley. They got back about the same time I did.

I talked to former Tassajara owner Bob Beck about it. He said they were carrier or homing pigeons and that they had been used to carry messages in and out of Tassajara years back. Or maybe that was other pigeons. I'll ask Sterling what he thinks.

Later in the summer I got the job of driving the six ton flat bed four hours to Dos Palos to Koda Brothers Farm to get a ton or maybe two tons of brown rice. some white, and some bags of gluton rice for baking and making mochi. I hope that the ZC still gets their rice from the Koda Bros. I brought some friends with me, the pigeons re-caught and boxed gingerly for the trip. Dos Palos is between I 5 and 99 north of Fresno and the road there through Los Banos has a famous windy as in wind blows stretch that was really acting up, making me fear a Volkswagon bus ahead would blow over. Big box trucks do that there. There are big warning signs. At the point that I was furthest away from Tassajara yet not too close to the Koda Brothers' organic fields, I pulled over, slid the back door up, brought the boxes down, and released the pigeons into a new wind-blown realm. I never saw them again.

Birds at Tassajara by William Sterling starts on p.13 of this Wind Bell - a much more positive approach to our avian friends.

I'll link to something of Sterling's later. - dc