The Sentinels

Not long ago Jane Schnee moved north from the Keys to Indian River County. A self-described nature lover, it was not until she got here that she began an earnest interest in birding and immediately started volunteering with Florida scrub-jay monitoring for Indian River County. As it turns out, she arrived in the middle of a quiet but persistent battle being waged against the forces pressuring this beautiful endemic bird, found nowhere else in the world, into extinction. 

Florida scrub-jays are about the same size as the more familiar blue jays but there are a couple of defining characteristics: The scrub-jay has no crest or tuft of feathers on its head like the blue jay; its blue and blue-gray coloration lacks the white feathers of other jays. The head, wings and tail are a vivid, almost Dodger, blue. The back, chin and belly are a pale gray. Adults display a necklace of blue feathers. The only way to tell the difference between the male and female in the field is that females make a hiccup noise. For about five months after fledging, the juveniles are known as brownheads, lacking the blue head and necklace of the adults until they molt.

To find a Florida scrub-jay, you need to find Florida scrub habitat, a habitat characterized by woody shrub species like scrub oaks and palmetto, generally no higher than six-feet, open-sand patches, and the lack of a tree canopy. One reason for the birds’ preference for this habitat is the food they eat: 60 percent animal protein from insects and small herptiles and 40 percent from vegetable matter including acorns.