OMG, Evelyn! If you knew how many baby mockingbirds I hand fed while working at Audubon, you'd die! People would bring in baby birds all day long, and you couldn't convince them to leave them alone, so my job was to take care of them and get them prepared to be released back into the wild later on. One of the reasons we do not encourage people "rescuing" the baby birds is that there comes a time when the bird has imprinted so strongly on the parent bird, it will not take food from a person. You can cram it down their throats, but it will just sit in the crop area and not be digested. So removing them from the parent's care is often a death sentence. Now if a whole nest comes down (like during a storm) sometimes there is no recourse but to rescue them and try to feed them. And I know techniques have improved GREATLY from the days I was involved in bird rescue. So the odds might be better now. But lordy, lordy...I must have handraised at least 200 baby mockingbirds in a couple years time. Not to mention jays, grackles, thrashers, titmice, and maybe 1,000 mourning doves! (My least favorite baby birds of all time.) Anyway, your picture is a trip down memory lane for sure. Saintp, the length of time it takes an egg to hatch varies from species to species, but usually it is not very long. A week or ten days, often. I'll see if I can find out about bluejays. I don't remember. Maybe I never even knew. But the info is probably out there somewhere. Will get back to you later. Marcia

I'm not thrilled with blue jays. They are up there on the list of fragmentation related increased levels of predation of birds nests, yes, they do go after other birds eggs and babies. I had a devil of a time with them last summer particularly when nestlings fledged. I had about 5-6 box nesters last summer and warred with the jays over all of them - worse with the ground nesters. They went after the babies every single time. They seem to have some sort of radar for the event. Fortunately I work from home and it's a racket when happening, but I scared the Mom bird just as badly. I have bird feeders and I do my best not to supply what they like for food, such as peanuts and corn in my case. I do have a nut feeder but it's one they can't use. However, jays are also attracted to water so at bird baths which is important to have for all birds. Not much you can do about them, suburban gardens are perfect habitat. Try and provide thickets and dense shrubs to protect smaller birds is about all you can do. Make sure your bluebird box is somewhere near a thick shrubby area, the babies can fly to it when they leave the box. Other people really like the jays. It's humans that have created a better situation for them to hunt in, so not their fault, but dang it stinks to see them going after baby wrens.

Maybe a Great Black-backed Gull? This is a BIG gull with diverse tastes: "Great Black-backed Gulls are supreme opportunists. They follow fishing boats to pick up scraps of bait and discards, take garbage from trash cans and landfills, patrol beaches looking for morsels that wash up from the sea, harry other seabirds to steal their catches, and ruthlessly prey on smaller birds, eggs, and chicks. " Claire

Hi calliope! Ours here do the SAME thing. I have been seeing groups of 6-8 Blue Jays flying together across the yard, all of them yelling loudly the whole way. I don't think that the behavior is connected to a hawk here. I noticed it last year when the parents fledged their young. They stayed in and around the yard for a long time, and they would engage in this same screaming Blue Jay posse behavior. I'm not sure why they do it though.