The Naturalist and the Jay

hakaimagazine.com

23 points·samclemens··4 comments

Putting a range map that covers from southern USA to north of the Arctic circle in Mercator projection is just negligent. https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/data-visualisation-...

neat article. im surprised at the lack of any mention of the Steller's Jay, which is the provincial bird of BC and lives in the same PNW regions. If anyones got a similar article that covers steller's jay social heirarchy, id appreciate a link; been wondering how these birds organize.

> This jay’s name, recorded in the data as WLKOSR, is an acronym for the color combination of the three bands on his legs.

I'm getting a good vibe from these ornithologists.

"WLKOSR" seems to mean White [on the] Left, blacK Over Silver [on the] Right (3 bands).

The other named bird that was mentioned was "Yosel Wober (YOSLWOBR)": Yellow Over Silver Left, White Over Blue Right (4 bands).

(Or maybe "O" stands for "Orange", but that would mean YOSLWOBR has six bands; however all of the pictured birds had 3 or 4 bands. Also, in these two instances, "O" is always between two other colors, which is why I guessed it means "Over".)

The "silver" band is apparently a metal band with an ID number that's placed on all birds, and the others are colored plastic bands that generate a locally unique identifier that can be read from a distance. The first page of the following reference gives some insight into the band encoding used by a particular research group (similar, but all their birds have exactly four bands), and the second page has examples of unique tags assigned to a collection of birds:

https://www.uwyo.edu/biodiversity/_files/documents/misc/bird...

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