Steller's Jay help (1 Viewer)

I'm not sure if this is where I should post this so I am sorry if I'm in the wrong topic. I'm on dialup and have a hard time traveling around to figure out where I need to be.

We have quite a few Steller's Jays that have become pests this year and we really don't know what to do about them and I am hoping somebody here would have ideas. I can't find any helpful information doing a search on Google.

We have always had them around since we moved here and they were never a problem before. Last year they started hanging around much more through winter than they usually did and this year we have the adults and their offspring and they have chased away 75% of our other birds (mostly smaller tweety birds we never have been able to ID, but our Canadian Jays don't hardly show up anymore and they had become tame enough to eat from our hands and I really miss them coming around). We have our usual little tweety bird hanging around but they never get to eat the seed we put out anymore. We also have some doves that showed up about 2 years ago maybe and when they do come up they don't usually back down but they don't come up as often with all the jays zipping all over the place.

We do have 2 feeding spots and use generic wild bird seed. It does have sunflower seeds in it but buying without has made no difference with the jays showing up the way they do. The birds get fed about 1 time per day (more in the winter, especially after it's snowed heavily). We toss old bread, rolls, etc out they come in to eat as well once or twice a week.

We have a cat and he normally leaves the birds alone but he never has caught one when he does get frisky and the jays are too fast and cautious for him anyway. We also have had a falcon hanging around going after the jays for the last 3 months or so but he has yet to actually catch any.

Does anybody have ideas about controlling the jays? We don't want to loose our other birds and would like to draw our other ones back again. Most people say to stop feeding but we loose the other birds that way and it's too close to winter and they will be looking for food when it starts to snow soon. We don't want to hurt the birds either. I also saw something about using a stuffed owl or something but that would scare the other birds and it would get soaked and blown away in the wind and rain.

Has anybody else had similar issues and found something that worked for them? Sorry this got a bit long but I felt some background info would be helpful.

Thanks in advance!

My guess is that it's the bird of prey (probably not a falcon BTW but a Cooper's or Sharp-shinned Hawk) that's the problem, not the jays. I have up to 6 or 7 Western Scrub-jays hanging around my feeders much of the year where I throw out peanuts for them. When the peanuts run out--usually after a few minutes--they pick out the sunflower seeds from the seed mix and the suet cakes but there's always plenty of food left for the other feeder birds (kinglets, warblers, sparrows, woodpeckers, quail, doves etc). When the hawks come around, however, all the feeder birds, big or small, disappear, sometimes for long periods.

Edit--
Just noticed it's your first post. Welcome aboard. There's lots on BF for people interested in birds both here in the feeder forum and in the many other forums and I hope you stick around after your question's answered.

We did ID the raptor and it appears to be a Merlin (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Merlin/id) which was a small falcon according to the info on that page. I don't know the last time it came around but it's been awhile. A couple months ago was the very first time we had ever seen it for the 10 years or so we've lived here. We figured it was just passing through and hung around for a bit before moving on. It's been a couple weeks or so since I saw it last. If your curious, it looked closest to the "Adult female (Taiga)" one on the page. It would perch on the trees 15 feet from our porch as well as the porch railing and didn't seem to be afraid of us and it would stick around for an hour or two at a time chasing the Jays. I wish I would have gotten a picture I did look up the 2 hawks you listed and it was definatly not one of those. The wing tips were pointed, it wasn't as big as most of the usual hawks in the area and the coloring and patterns didn't look very similar (especially for the adults).

The falcon isn't the problem. It didn't come around until within the last few months. The Jays have been a problem for the last year, long before the falcon showed up.

By the way, we do have red tail hawks and bald eagles that come around every year and they have never been a problem with the smaller birds. They usually will hide out in the trees for a bit but not very long. The hawks and eagles don't usually hang around more than to circle the field a few times and head off over the woods again.

The Jays are 100% the problem. There's like 14 of them out there and as soon as food is put out they attack the containers like they haven't eaten in weeks and chase away anything that comes anywhere near them. They completely wipe out the scoop of food in each dish and they stand guard in the trees waiting for anything else to get put out. We don't put special food out for them. Like I said, it's just a generic wild bird seed mix we've bought for years. The Jays have been around since we first moved here but we usually had no more than 3 or 4 at a time and they didn't usually come around much once it started snowing. With the last few years they started hanging around year round and decided they liked the bird seed more than the cat food that they used to focus on. They were not a problem last winter, but this last spring we suddenly had a whole flock of them and they bullied all of the other birds away, except the doves that stand up to them. But, there's never any food for the doves by the time the jays swarm in.

And thanks Being on dialup I might not post much but if our other birds ever come back it'd be nice to find a way to ID some of the smaller tweety birds. I know one was a grosbeak but the others we never could ID (except our pretty little gold finches that were among those chased off). We only have 1 breed that still tries to come up although we don't hardly see them as often as we did. There is a 2nd breed we see from time to time but we did have 7 or 8 different ones excluding the ones I have mentioned that were coming around daily for the last 5+ years that got chased away. I never did get pictures of any of them before the Steller's Jays chased them off

atryeu said:

The Jays are 100% the problem. There's like 14 of them out there and as soon as food is put out they attack the containers like they haven't eaten in weeks and chase away anything that comes anywhere near them.

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There are partial solutions.
One is feeders that have a wire mesh around them to restrict entry, so smaller birds can eat in peace without the jays etc forcing them off.
Another is to hang suet feeders or satellite feeders under a tight dome, so small birds can get under or cling to the suet underside, but big jays cannot.
Neither fix helps bring back the Canada Jays.
In theory, you could add more feeders to prevent the Stellers Jays from hogging the spread, but with 14 of them, it is a stretch.

Ideally there is some super preferred jay food that all the jays would focus on and leave the rest alone. Peanut butter mixed with Crisco is a possibility (the Crisco cuts the stickiness of peanut butter so it is safe to put out for birds), everybody likes it here in NYC Central Park, but Stellers Jays are not found here, so ymmv.
Maybe just enjoy them, they are very beautiful even if they are a pest.