Birds Birds Birds

I've been spending a lot of time working out on my deck so I've been able to take some cool videos of some of the bigger birds we have in our neighborhood. This year we have a pair of red-tailed hawks that have been hanging around and at least one raven, there may be two of them but I'm not sure as I've only ever seen one at a time. 

So one day all the little birds went crazy, all of their alarm calls went up, and sure enough one of the hawks was in prime hunting position on the old oak tree trunk stump. I watched it sit there and preen for a few minutes and was lucky enough to take this video when he (or she?) finally dove downhill. I'm assuming it was to hunt something, but who really knows.

Pretty soon after that, a large black bird flew up the hill and I could see that it was the raven that hangs around here. He (or she?) then took up the same position on the old oak tree trunk. Maybe it was an attempt to see if there were going to be any scraps left from the hawk's hunting? Pretty exciting stuff for our quiet neighborhood. The two pairs of bluejays went into action soon afterwards, a lot of frantic noises because they're in nesting mode.

My son has been doing the vegetable gardening so he noticed one of our two pairs of bluejays were reusing the same nesting spot as last year. Four little babies! It's under our deck, so when we're out there, our dog is very very interested in this exact spot above the nest. You can hear little noises and Meg can obviously smell them. They really look like mini dinosaurs in this state. The parents made a huge mess on our patio bringing down branches from our apple trees that had moss on them. It was like a building materials staging area which they then picked The Best twigs to use in making the nest. Or maybe it was like a decoy nest? I don't know bird behavior at all so I'm just guessing here.

Here's how they look as of yesterday, already blue and barely all fitting in the nest. Photo credit to Alex on both of these pictures.