By Nancy Landrum, participant,

Check out a 'Murder of Crows and other spooky bird tales" challenge to view another story and photo by Nancy, entry #

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Every time we are fortunate to have an animal grace us with his or her presence, we can see that no two are alike, regardless of the species. I always wanted to portray the personalities of my critters as they would play out in the human world. Take Stickey, the Blue Jay, for instance. Always having heard such bitter tales of their personalities, and even Audubon painted him as thief and murderer, I was surprised to find out what a happy and agreeable creature this rescued Jay is.

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Of course since noise is their one of their main hobbies, the more people around the better, and lawn mowers make him sing, actually, his particular song of joy is the mimicking of a telephone ring. He eats everything, except of course, worms.

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When I first offered him one he acted like I was trying to poison him and then I read that Blue Jay tummies do not react well to those nematodes. My husband sneaked him a large spider once when I was out of the room, and he loved it, but spiders are on my list of no-no's for Stickey because of their poison fangs.

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Nobody can go to the refrigerator or into the kitchen and dare walk by his cage with a treat without him begging for a taste. And he loves not only all sort of meats and fowl, but raw broccoli and cauliflower as well.

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When he was a teenager, I would give him M&Ms to play with. He would be busy sorting them and placing them in the holes in the "furniture" we made for him. But one day I noticed he was eating almost all of them, so I had to pull back, and he only gets them now on Christmas, Easter and Halloween. From the beginning, I stupidly gave him milk, and now he a milk junky. I know it's not supposed to be good for him, but after 12 years, I think he's okay with it.

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A couple of years ago I gave Stickey his own Myspace page, and discovered a myriad of birds there, but only two other Jays and a Starling. Now dear Stickey befriended this bird, but Mr. High and Mighty Starling would never respond. I had the misfortune of tending  to one of these birdies as my son was driving home and a flock went by and the car hit one of the youngsters, flipping him all the way over the vehicle and flat into the street. Of course he came home and inhabited a cage next to Stickey.

Stickey was perplexed at just how cranky this bird was, and that his diet consisted only of the precious and costly mealworm. Thank goodness, on  one of the starling's runarounds outdoors, he flew away. Whew! We had to run to the bait shop vending machines in the middle of the night where only waxworms were available, but still the starling would be up all night pacing and complaining because he hated them and would do so until the next mealworm supply showed up.

Stickey, on the other hand,  sleeps from dusk until dawn and is satisfied with his peanuts and whatever other food he is allowed to consume on a daily basis. To make the story short, which I obviously am having difficulty doing, there was a group on Myspace called, Altered Animals, which was brilliantly run and for Photoshopped pets. The work contributed was amazing and funny for beginners. I got a copy of Photoshop CS3, and it took forever for me to figure out how to use the layers, but once I got that down, the rest was easy. The animation program that came with it was so complicated and left behind strange purple ghost lines, I chose to use the movie maker in Corel.

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Well, with a change of Computers, Corel was lost and someone clued me in to a site called Mytheme. They have an application for slide shows which allows the manipulation of frame rates, so I now use this. It is limited of course, but  works flawlessly. First I choose a background as the first layer, and then as the next layer, the Blue Jay. I would save that. Then adding a new layer, I would change something on the Blue Jay, and then save that. Mytheme allows nine frames, but they must all be the same size. The first animations I made were with the simple Paint program that comes with Windows. I would be up nights trying to trick it to do what I wanted, but it really works. So I have done many still pictures this way and several animations, and it is simply a joy to see your pet becoming part of a great work of art.

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I am sending a still I did of Stickey looking out of place at the Vatican, and he did win with that one, including several others. Believe me, the competition was stiff, and this got me working very hard. I checked out Worth1000, and saw how the pros do it, but I know I could never equal their skills, so my efforts are rather simple, but it's the fun that counts.