We caught this Western scrubjay on our closing net run today. They general stay above the nets, and are pretty smart, so we don't catch many. Scrubjays are one of the study species here at Palo, so in addition to the usual silver band with a number on it, we fashioned it with some color bands, allowing the nest searchers/finders/gridders to identify the individual again, without having to recapture it.
With a couple of the color banded species we have to use pyropens to melt the plastic bands together so that the birds cannot pick them off with their strong bills
This bird was just beginning to go through its prebasic molt (the yearly replacement of feathers) and may be the first adult bird we've seen in this process this year...
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