Another bird from my Portland trip: the western scrub jay. Portland doesn't have the Cyanocitta cristata Blue Jays (the most common ones... the ones with a top knot). The only jays I've ever seen in PDX are the scrub jays.
"Not to be confused with LL Cool J," says my husband Dana. Jays, magpies, crows and ravens make up the corvid family. They all have similar personalities: fairly intelligent, but noisy, scrappy and generally unrepentant. They're kind of pretty, even if they are butt-heads.
Doodled from a photo at Wikimedia Commons.
