Henry visits his new buddy, Alex Parker. (Photo: Alex Parker) Alex Parker was in his Boulder, Colorado, backyard when Henry first appeared. The young blue jay looked a little scruffy and tired, but was very interested in what Parker was doing. "I was outside working on a new mantel for our fireplace, and Henry flew in and perched on the gutter right above me," Parker tells MNN. "He was watching me and making a call I associate with fledglings asking their parents for food, and when I approached him he didn’t shy away." Parker says he thinks Henry was a fairly recent fledgling, due to his muted colors and some of his tuft-like feathers. "He was pretty low energy, but generally alert and not showing any obvious signs of illness — just perhaps exhaustion," says Parker, a planetary astronomer based at the Southwest Research Institute. Assuming the blue jay was hungry, Parker tossed some seeds up onto the roof next to the bird, but Henry didn’t seem to know what to do with them. "He eventually fluttered down onto my workbench, and he still seemed to have a hard time working out what to do with hard food. He’d […]
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