<p>The hardy Steller's jay doesn't need to migrate in winter.</p>

Stellers jays belong to the family of magpies and crows and there are several sub-species of jays, such as the real blue jays that are east of the Rocky Mountains, gray jays that are commonly called camp robbers and scrub jays that are just about everywhere, including in many cities. Most people call Stellers jays blue jays, but no matter what you call the jays, they are quite noisy, and when they discover an owl trying to take a nap in some tree, they pester it for hours by going into a frenzy so every creature in the forest will know where it is.

Stellers jays breed from Alaska to California and are found in the Rockies to the Pacific wherever there are evergreen trees and mountains. They are a deeper blue than their eastern cousins, and their crested heads are almost black. When I was a kid, the filbert growers hated these jays because they went back and forth all day long carrying the nuts to secret hiding places to eat during the winter. These jays do eat many insects, but they can make a living on acorns and pine seeds. They do not need to migrate in winter as they seem to do well in the snowy forest, partly because they can consume the food that they have cached away.

The only time of year these jays are quiet and secretive is during nesting season. Their nests are hard to find as they are often as high as 50 feet from the ground in dense evergreen trees. They lay four or five eggs and both parents share in feeding the young birds. Stellers jays have one peculiarity that most outdoorsmen know about and this is the ability to mock a redtailed hawks shrill cry and even to whistle like a hunter calling his dog.

Also, they have a unique method of hunting for food: they climb a pine tree like they are climbing a spiral staircase. They start down low and keep hopping up to the next branch and around the trunk until they come to the crown, and then they fly way down to the next tree and repeat the performance. These are just some of the oddities that make bird-watching so interesting.