- Head and neck all around, and back sooty black, touched with streaks
of cerulean blue on forehead, and pale gray on chin and blue on wings
and tail; terminal portion of tail and wings crossed with fine black
bars, sharply on secondaries and tertials, faintly or not at all on
greater coverts.
- Their bills and feet are black.
- Range/ Habitat: Pacific coast from southern California to Alaska;
resident and breeding throughout it's range.
- In the fall, winter, and spring their food consists largely of acorns,
chestnut, berries, seeds, grain, insect, lizards etc.,
- during the summer months the destroy and devour a great many eggs
and young of the smaller birds, their taste for which, being so great
that they are known to watch a nest until the full compliment of eggs
is laid before making their theft.
- Their nests consist of a bulky mass of fine twigs thickly plastered
centrally with mud and lined with fine rootlets placed 6 to 30 feet
high in evergreen tree thickets or near the edge of a clearing.
- They lay 3 to 5 eggs, usually 4, are pale bluish green, uniformly
but moderately spotted with olive brown and pale rufous and with numerous
shell markings of lavender. Usually laid from April to May.
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