Marauding Magpies and Bad Boy Blue Jays in west Centennial, Arapahoe County

[kevyg...@aol.com]

Hello Fellow Birders,

 

   Paula Hansley's recent post about a flock of Bushtits chirping and chipping at her suet prompts me to report on a phenomenon I've not seen before in my little townhouse yard near Holly & Arapahoe in west Centennial.

 

   In the past month or so gangs of 30+ Black-billed Magpies and 24+ Blue Jays have taken over my yard, demolishing a brick of suet in an hour or less and terrorizing the smaller birds (except the male Broad-tailed Hummingbird who continues to patrol the hummer feeder and isn't afraid of anyone).  I finally stopped putting out suet because it takes me a couple of hours to make a batch of 6 bricks and I was starting to feel like Sisyphus.

 

  I've had both species coming to my yard over the years, but never before in such large flocks.  I'm also seeing them foraging in the lawns around here, I'm hoping they're looking for the Japanese Beetles & their grubs which have also shown up here in abundance this summer.  Another interesting note is that the small murder of American Crows that usually is in the neighborhood has not been around lately.

Keep Smilin',

Kevin Corwin

west Centennial, Arapahoe County

 

Sent from my Remington Rand Typewriter via my Rotary Dial Wall Phone

 

 

[Mel Goff]

We have been having flocks of 30-75 Black-billed Magpies fly over our house every evening in the hour before sunset. One night we counted almost 100. We have also noticed that our neighborhood American Crows are not around right now.

 

On a brighter note, we have a mob of Bushtits that descend on our suet, usually twice a day. Being as small as they are, they cannot go through a brick very quickly.

 

Mel Goff

Colorado Springs, El Paso County

 

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[Patrick O'Driscoll]

Hey Kevin -- 

Here in east-central Denver, a mile SE of Denver City Park and 2 doors down from East Colfax, we had a flock of 45 magpies foraging up and down my block all day two weeks ago, and about 4 of them have continued to visit in or around my yard since then.

I assume many of them came from City Park, where summer dozens of parents and offspring (many big nests in old trees) have suddenly gone scarce.

Meanwhile, the one or two Blue Jays that have visited my yard on and off over the past month suddenly became 7 yesterday, and they and the magpies spent a lot of time jockeying for my suet feeder, seed platform and peanut wreath then and again today.

A regular pair of flickers, 3-6 chickadees, two collared doves and several House Finches have paid their feeder visits whenever they can, between scrums by the corvids.

Speaking of which, we always have a few crows around; lately there's a noisy early-morning meetup of 6-16 atop a tall cottonwood down the back alley.

Come winter, we'll have hundreds flying west overhead near sunset, heading for roosts close to and sometimes IN downtown.

And some days from winter into spring, I'll get as many as 30-40 right in the yard earlier in the day, usually aiming for the peanuts.

Patrick O'Driscoll

Denver, Hale neighborhood

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[David Suddjian]

Magpie's hit peak numbers in August here at Ken Caryl in JeffCo, too, when suddenly flocks of 30-75 birds are evident, often after a time post nesting when the species becomes rather less evident. 

Two eBird graphs below show Magpie stats from the Denver/Arapahoe/Douglas/Jefferson four-county area. The top one shows "Average Count" with the high magpie numbers peaking at this time. The second one shows frequency of occurrence (% of total checklists), with a seasonal ebb for detection right when the highest numbers are found. Interesting. The pattern is: a dip in frequency of detection (found less often) directly after nesting, which overlaps with the highest counts for the species of the year. This suggests they have gathered into flocks at this time with numbers concentrated that way. Then after they probably disperse more evenly. 

David Suddjian

Ken Caryl Valley

Littleton, CO

Here is the definition of the "Average Count" metric:
Average Count: the average number of birds seen on checklists that detected the species, within a specified date range and region. This only incorporates checklists that reported the species (no zeros, unlike abundance), which tells us how many of a species we can expect to see where/when the species encountered. 

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