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by 0x0203 473 days ago
Another fun bird fact about bluejays and crows: listening for a bunch of screaming crows and/or jays is a good way of finding owls, as they both seem to have an inherent hatred of owls, and harass them whenever given a chance. In my area, the poor owls rarely seem to get any rest from being swooped and yelled at all day.
4 comments

We have a big ponderosa pine on our property and sometimes the stellar jays go wild when there is a bird of prey up there.

We have seen barred owls, great horned owls, and cooper’s hawks.

https://imgur.com/a/ymDn7ff

I haven't seen this with owls but we've got some kind small predator bird like a peregrine falcon that the blue jays have it absolutely out for. The most interesting thing is once they start making the alerting calls, an inter-species mob will form with other birds of similar sized that aren't usually aggressive (like northern flickers) and they'll all harass the falcon until it flies off.
It's called mobbing!
In my area the yelling is always about hawks. The owls here are nocturnal so they don’t overlap.