Distribution and Habitat
The Island Scrub Jay is found only on Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's Channel Islands with an area of 250 km2 (96 mi2). The island is a nature reserve, the eastern 24% being administered by National Park Service as the part of the Channel Islands National Park and the rest of the island by the Nature Conservancy.
The Island Scrub Jay is not known to have occurred anywhere else historically, and no fossil remains have been found on the well-researched neighboring islands (Curry & Delaney 2002).
Females lay 3 to 5 eggs. Incubation lasts approximately 20 days. These jays are monogamous and, unlike some other jays, are not cooperative breeders. Both sexes build a nest 1 m (3 ft) to 8 m (26 ft) high.
The genus name, Aphelocoma, comes from the Latinized Ancient Greek apheles- (from ἀφελής-) "simple" + Latin coma (from Greek kome κόμη) "hair", in reference to the lack of striped or banded feathers in this genus, compared to other jays. The species name, insularis, comes from the Latin for "from an island".
Read more about this topic: Island Scrub Jay
Famous quotes containing the words distribution and/or habitat:
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.”
—William James (1842–1910)