The message
from Janet Tweedy contains these words:

In article , Janet Galpin
writes
Spot on. Hearing the same quarrelsome squawking this afternoon, I was
just in time to see an altercation between a jay and a magpie. Only the
second time I've seen a jay in the garden so I was quite excited



We've got a family of five in our garden and to be honest I really don't
like them, they are bullies on the bird feeders and harass the smaller
birds. They also seem to go after the nests because in the spring you
got a lot of bird alarms and out of the bushes would fly one or other of
the Jay family.
Still whilst they are squabbling with the starlings and pigeons they
leave the others alone


Partly novelty value in my case I guess. You rarely see them round here,
perhaps because there's not much tree cover. My own tree cover is
becoming significant so I like to think I'm attracting birds which
weren't around a while ago. I tend to view magpies in much the same way
as you view jays.

An interesting thing about the raiding of the hazelnuts which I forgot
to mention before is that I often pickup a nut believing it to be OK,
only to find that if you squeeze it there is a neat crack along the
midway mark and the contents have disappeared. I'm wondering how a jay,
say, could so neatly and only partially crack the nut open, and
completely and cleanly remove the contents.

Janet G