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The Mean Girls of Millennium Park make sure Merlin can't sit anywhere near them

Merlin and Jays at Millennium Park

The other day, Mary Ellen was down at Millennium Park in West Roxbury, when she saw a merlin and some blue jays. And then more jays. Eventually, about eight of the screaming birds surrounded the raptor and chased it away. And then they followed it and chased it away again. And again.

In this corner ...

A blue jay and a merlin

Blue jays are a member of the corvid (yes, with an 'r') family, like crows, which also know how to team up and mob raptors.

I'm outta here:

A merlin
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Comments

 

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Toronto Blue Jays actually have somewhere to be right now.

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"Toronto Blue Jays actually have somewhere to be right now."

Well, they _did_. Until the Rays swept them out yesterday.

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Buffalo. I bet the atmosphere was better in the empty AAA stadium than Toronto's home field.

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The name "Corvidae" come from "corvus", which is the Latin word for "crow". In classical Latin it was pronounced "COR-wus". In "corw", we see the same word ad "crow" with two of the letters reversed, indicating that this is an old Indo-European word that goes way back in the history of both languages.

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Nobody - absolutely nobody - does shitlist like bluejays.

Merlin is automatically on the shitlist.

This year, many of my yard's blue jays have been rather faddishly imitating the local raptors, albeit anemically. This seems to have passed on to the second brood, which the first helps raise.

We have a ballsy squirrel we call SL. He's also on ours after he chewed through the kitchen window screen twice and absconded with a goldilox bagel. SL is the kind of squirrel who will run directly at a dog on a leash and sprint off, just to jack the dog up.

SL has spent much of this summer being tormented by mobs of jays imitating red tail hawks and the nearby great horned owls. I suspect he ate some eggs early in the season, or maybe they just know an asshole when they see one.

When the jays corner SL between the wall outside my home office and the retaining wall, it can get pretty damn surreal. Weak Owl and Hawk noises, and the usual skrawwwking. Hilarious and very wrong.

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There's an old crow (Diana Ploss) that needs chasing away.

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was watching a crow harass a red-tailed hawk at the same time a blue jay was harassing the crow.

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