← Field Guide

California Scrub-Jay

Aphelocoma californica
CASJ · Corvidae · Crows, Jays, and Magpies
Grassland provisional · from avonet
29heard

The California scrub jay (Aphelocoma californica) is a species of scrub jay native to western North America. It ranges from southern British Columbia throughout California and western Nevada near Reno to west of the Sierra Nevada. The California scrub jay was once lumped with Woodhouse's scrub jay and collectively called the western scrub jay. The group was also lumped with the island scrub jay and the Florida scrub jay; the taxon was then called simply scrub jay. The California scrub jay is nonmigratory and can…

Wikipedia ↗
mean confidence
14–16 in wingspanestimated

Wingspan and trait data: Fox et al. (2026), CC BY 4.0; incorporating AVONET (Tobias et al. 2022) and BirdWingData (Shiomi et al. 2025)

California Scrub-Jay
Aphelocoma_californica_in_Seattle.jpg: Minette Layne derivative work: Samsara (talk)CC BY-SA 2.0
29Detections
6Days heard
0.76Mean confidence
15 AugFirst heard
26 SepLast heard
1,909Stations worldwide

By hour of day

00061218

Counts reflect vocal activity and ambient noise, not abundance.

Recent days

15 Aug 26 Sep

Daily counts. Seasonal bars replace this once there is a year of records to draw them from.

Where heard

At home5 detections
On outings24 detections

Home and away are counted separately everywhere except here.

Where it lives

Breeding and resident range, from BirdWeather. Not where you have heard it — that is the map on the Outings page.

Leaflet · CARTO · range polygons from BirdWeather

Recordings

Highest-confidence detections first. Confidence is a threshold, not a probability of being correct.

2026-08-16 07:25
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-16 07:18
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-16 07:25
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-16 07:50
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-15 07:24
9 s
Away
0.98
2026-08-15 07:12
9 s
Away
0.97
2026-08-16 07:50
9 s
Away
0.97
2026-08-15 07:29
9 s
Away
0.94
2026-08-15 07:11
9 s
Away
0.94
2026-08-16 07:18
9 s
Away
0.92
2026-08-15 07:22
9 s
Away
0.90
2026-08-15 07:24
9 s
Away
0.82
Station PUC-29278 on BirdWeather Data updated 28 Sep, 12:45pm Archive