Recognition: Our common backyard jay is a very familiar bird: medium-sized, blue, and unmistakable. You are unlikely to confuse them with bluebirds, our next most common bird that is blue, which are smaller, quiet, mild-mannered birds, utterly dissimilar in personality to the raucous and domineering jays.
We do have one other local jay, known formally as the Steller’s jay and formerly as the crested jay, which is rather more obvious. He lives in forests and has a big black crest, a black head, and a rather prettier pattern on his blue feathers.
Name: Officially, this bird is known as the California scrub-jay. And you could call it that: as far as official names go, “scrub-jay” is quite usable. Even if “scrub” is not quite a comprehensive description of its preferred habitat (are you calling my backyard “scrub”?), it does serve to distinguish it from our forest-dwelling Steller’s jay.
Casually, a fair number of people call it a blue jay. And if you call it that, I wouldn’t blame you. Some birders will — this is a classic trigger for birder pedanticism as they point out that “Blue Jay” is the official, American Ornithologist Union-blessed designation for a particular eastern species of jay. You can usually get around their nit-picking if you simply call it a “jay.” Or there is an alternative response to birders’ finicky bowing to taxonomic precedent: ignore them. They’ll be ok.
If you want to be an idiosyncratic connoisseur of antiquated folk names, you can join me in reviving the charming name of blue squawker, for which I make an extended case below.
Where and When: Squawkers live here all year round, in a wide variety of habitats: residential neighborhoods, oak woodlands of all kinds, and scrubby natural habitats like the hot inland chaparral or foggy coastal scrub. Most places except for dense forest and treeless grassland really.
Voice: Jays squawk! Loud, harsh, and unmusical. And pretty unmistakable: add this to the list of bird sounds that you, utter birding novice, already recognize, along with hammering woodpeckers, hooting owls, cawing crows, and cooing doves.
Portrait: I Defend the Blue Squawker
Jays are divisive. They certainly have their admirers, as almost all birds do. But they also have detractors, both casual and committed, who in their combined ranks exceed the not-a-fan clubs of any other native bird that I can think of. Why?
One immediate reason: people don’t like their voice. The harshness, loud volume, and lack of musicality of typical jay speech simply annoys some people. This is one of the more superficial reasons for jay-antipathy, but a fairly common one among the casual detractors.
Somewhat more substantial, and the justification for dislike I hear more often than any other, is undoubtedly their domineering and bullying attitude towards smaller birds. There are a few variations on this sentiment. Most commonly, it arises from the simple observation of an everyday occurrence: various small songbirds will be feeding on a birdfeeder, a jay will fly in with a raucous squawk, and the small birds will scatter. This protective sympathy for smaller birds grows in force when people learn that jays do not simply scatter small birds from feeders when the fancy strikes them, but actively prey on them, especially eggs and nestlings.
Finally, jays are also in the rare category that will actually kill others of their own kind, not for food, but out of what is presumably territorial tribalism (it usually takes a group of jays to kill an individual through repeated blows). Many people find that behavior to have a disturbing misalignment with their whole conception of birds, who they thought to be more peaceful creatures than that, some predators excepted.
All of these facts are true. Their voices are not pretty, they do eat smaller birds, and they do fight and kill other members of their own species. But as Catullus put it:
… haec ego sic singula confiteor.
Totum illud formosa nego
I admit these things singly [Quintia’s height, good figure, fair complexion]
But that they add up to beauty I deny.
It works the same way in reverse circumstances. All the bad things you’ve heard about jays: they’re all true, at least in some sense. But I don’t believe that the sum of all these complaints is an unequivocal condemnation. Other people who cite such facts may be very reasonable, Quintia might check lots of boxes of loveliness, and squawkers might check many boxes of irritation-potential and outright meanness, but I don’t judge birds or people by resumé. Surfaces can be so misleading. What is the justice behind each of these three reasons for dislike? What can one say in this bird’s favor? Whether you number yourself among the jay’s admirers or detractors, I hope that by going through this series of accusations and defenses we will get a little closer to a more robust appreciation, one that neither collapses before certain facts, nor relies on ignorance of the seemingly unsavory.
The First Accusation: Unloveliness of Voice
My pledges
Sung in a voice
Like that of the jay;
Even when I cry
You do not lend an ear.
– Oya No Urazumi, 18th century kyoka poet
Few humans consider this an inherently lovely sound:
This roughness of voice is in many people’s minds the defining characteristic of jays, whatever the species. The first jay so-named in North America, who makes a sound that is perhaps more clearly jay-like, was the blue jay of the east. Or, since I shared that nice Japanese poem, consider what they’re listening to over there.
There are variations, but the basic notion is the same. Typical adjectives might include: harsh, raucous, unmusical, squawking. Pretty much everyone can agree: if a human made these sounds, it would not be very appealing. If someone invented a musical instrument that sounded like this, no one would buy, play, or compose for them. But…
First and most obviously, it’s not a human making these sounds. If you’re a jay, there is undoubtedly a lot more subtlety and nuance that is invisible to us, under which overlay of meaning the tone would be radically transformed. I don’t know of any detailed analyses of scrub-jay language, but similar attempts have been made for other members of the corvid family (jays, crows, ravens), finding wide vocabularies that are distinguishable to our ears only with patient study or computer-generated sonograms, and even then only imperfectly.
For instance, many corvids will have particular alarm calls for different threats: a soaring hawk, a smaller, tree-dwelling ambush hawk, a ground-based predator, a climbing predator, and so on. And this brings me to a Second Point to Remember about the jay voice: its calls are loud and overbearing in large part because they often are alarm calls. And these are calls which not only jays can take advantage of: all the smaller songbirds know that something is happening, often understand what danger is now approaching, and can take appropriate action.
Is that voice rather loud? Of course it is, and you want it to be. When you’re installing fire alarms in a school or a siren for an ambulance, do you look for the quietest, gentlest, most unobjectionable sound? No! You look for something that is going to be as obnoxious and unignorable as possible. You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, a harp to a fire-alarm audition, or a hermit thrush to a woodland-warning competition. You bring a jay. They were made for this.
Third Point in defense of jay voices: while those alarm calls you’re always hearing are loud, jays can also be remarkably quiet. Although corvids are technically part of the songbird order, they don’t sing in the same demonstrative way most smaller songbirds do. Instead, jays have a “quiet song,” which you have probably never heard and for which recordings are scarce. Listen to this song, usually given between two members of an intimate jay couple and audible only at a short distance, and reappraise your notion of the jay voice (ignore the background crows and humming recording):
Much of the time, jays are completely silent. I’m going to try not to quote Dawson in every essay, but I love the man. Here he is on this often under-recognized aspect of jay behavior:
But if the “Blue Jay” is active in the pursuit of mischief, he knows also how to become passive and to let Nature disclose her secrets to him. Especially in nesting time “watchful waiting” becomes the winning policy for the Blue Jay. Accordingly, he posts himself in some conspicuous place, a tree-top or a telephone wire, and looks and looks and looks.
Start watching your jays, not just noticing them when they vocalize. And you will find this is true: few birds seem to spend so much time silently looking as jays do. They are alert sentinels, like the way a flock of quail will post a male to watch out for threats. But compared to a quail, they are tougher and mean business, ready to jump into active defensive maneuvers, rather than just being delightfully round squeaky toys who confine their watchman’s responsibility to telling everyone to duck under the bushes.
Fourth and Final Point on the jay voice: My favorite of the traditional names for this bird is “blue squawker.” It’s unmistakable: everyone knows that they are blue and that they squawk. “Jay” is onomatopoeic in origin, but that’s easy to forget, especially since our jay’s call doesn’t sound as much like “jay” as the eastern bird’s. But it’s definitely a squawk. And when you put it in their name, call them squawker, then a curious mental change takes place: you accept that squawking is what they do, that they have no choice in the matter, and that their squawking, far from being an unalleviated disruption to the serenity of your life, in fact adds texture, contrast, and spice to your auditory landscape.
The late Preston Sturges comedy Unfaithfully Yours depicts a brilliant conductor. He admonishes his percussionist for an inadequately crashing performance on the cymbals during a rehearsal of Rossini’s Semiramide Overture. The percussionist mildly explains that he was raised to never be too loud, to never be vulgar. Being a masterful leader of musicians, the hero corrects him on the fly, sweeping him up in his symphonic enthusiasm, overriding such petty matters of politeness and decorum when there is something more urgent to be expressed: “Be vulgar by all means, but let me hear that brazen laugh!”
Sometimes, you need cymbals. And you need them loud and crashing. And in our landscape, you need the voices of jays, equally loud and crashing. Next time you hear them shout out a defiant warning over the mindless chatter of the less alert, rather than bemoan their loudness, thank them for their assistance and echo that encouragement: “Let me hear that brazen laugh!”
The Second Accusation: Bullying of the Little Guys
For those willing to overlook or excuse that harshness of voice, the next common critique of the squawker is their tendency to abuse and dominate the smaller backyard birds. From the casual human perspective, this is most often seen in the form of jays displacing small birds as they take their spot at a feeding statoin. This does not seem exactly fair (they fly away from us too; they fly away from any larger creature; no direct harm usually results), but is somewhat understandable if the underlying motive of putting out a bird feeder is to attract specifically the small birds: finches, chickadees, titmice, and the like.
If that’s your requirement, use a feeder with an outer cage to exclude large birds. Or stick to offering a nectar solution to hummers, Nyjer to goldfinches, and straight millet to the doves and sparrows – all foods the jays disdain. But if you put out an uncaged feeder offering the favorite jay foods of sunflower, nuts, or suet, then you simply have to accept that you have issued an invitation to the squawkers and it would be unreasonable to expect them to decline it.
It is unreasonable to expect them to decline your offering; it is unreasonable to expect anything other than the typical course of things to unroll: small birds will flee from the larger. But the utter context-dependency of “large” should be kept in mind: sometimes jays are the smaller party in comparison to a yet larger threat, and then their relative boldness breaks that rule of flight – to our admiration. It may be a hawk, it may be a cat, it may be a squirrel: in such cases the squawker will often take the lead in both giving the general alarm and fighting in the general defense. They may sometimes appear a bully, but they are also sometimes bullies in service of the local community.
The more serious variation on this Goliath-among-the-Davids critique is that jays do not just incidentally scatter the small birds, which is what we usually see, but that they also actively prey upon them, especially upon vulnerable eggs and nestlings. This has long been the core traditional complaint against them:
Too common also is a piteous outcry in the nesting season from a pair of smaller birds, fluttering about the nest where a Jay is stolidly taking one shrieking nestling after another.
– Ralph Hoffman, Birds of the Pacific Slope
Strictly speaking, this too falls under the category of “you can’t blame them.” When you’re a little chickadee, you raise your young on a diet of baby insects (eggs, caterpillars, pupae). When you’re a jay with hungry mouths to feed, you look for larger food sources: baby birds (eggs, helpless nestlings, near-helpless recent fledglings). That has always been the pattern of jay life, harsh though it seems. And as the adaptable squawkers flourish around human neighborhoods, it is possible that this habit leads to some deviation from our “preferred” relative abundance of species, with depressed songbird populations following on from elevated corvid populations (crows act in much the same way and have thrived among humans to an even greater extent).
It is the jay’s nature to eat baby birds: this can be hard for some people to accept, but true. But it often seems to me that the even more fundamental fact which so disturbs people comes on the other side of the equation: most baby birds do not survive to adulthood. Your local jay family may be the direct cause of death for dozens of birds this spring, but how many would have survived had that jay not been there? The world is full of threats: rats, squirrels, raccoons, crows, ravens, hawks, storms, heat, starvation, parental mishap, and the myriad human-caused threats of severed tree limbs, cats, collisions with cars and buildings, and the casual proliferation of poisons combine to form a challenging gauntlet to reach maturity. Modern humans have an expectation of infant survival which simply does not hold true in the bird world.
Think of the simple math: if we consider a steady population of a given bird species in an area to be an “acceptable” result, but if those birds are normally and typically producing, say, two broods of five young every year, or 30 young over three years of adult life, just to replace the two parents, we have to admit that survival is not the norm, but the exception. Jays are one of the multitude of dangers facing small songbirds, but they are just one of these threats. Viewed in the round, humans have had the objectively larger detrimental impact on most bird species, and we have more awareness and capability to mitigate those impacts than do the simple squawkers.
Some tender nest scenes before this discussion gets even darker.
The Third Accusation: Ineradicably Violent Character
Before we get to a more positive closing note, it’s going to get darker yet as we delve to the bottom of the various anti-jay antipathies. I mean to root them out, and for that we need to go all the way down.
The last section was about how they bully, catch, and eat smaller birds. I excused this on the nature of animals and the simple fact that they happened to occupy an area of the size spectrum in which their preferred prey items were of the size and type that bird-lovers tend to find most objectionable objects of consumption: baby chickadees and goldfinches and so on. This is a ubiquitous behavior that many people observe. Less frequent, but regularly occurring, is another type of violence in which jays are more exceptional: they will gang up and kill other jays.
I’ve seen it happen a few times: one jay stands at bay while numerous others dive in repeatedly, working in concert to deliver blow after blow. Why do they do this? Presumably out of territorial instinct, fighting a bird from outside the tribe. Many birds are territorial, but jays are more deadly due to their larger size and their greater intelligence, which enables cooperation.
This is comparatively rare among the bird world, and among the world of complex animals in general. Many species will prey on smaller animals, but few cooperate to kill others of their own kind. The most notable examples of this behavior, of course, are humans. We likewise have a marked tendency to kill others of our species, and the destructive magnitude of these events is often larger in our case, due to the potency of our weapons and the scale of our tribal alliances, which go beyond our immediate neighbors to encompass nationalistic, religious, or ideological factions.
No, it’s not pretty when a group of jays kills a lone bird, seemingly dispassionate towards the pain of their own kind, and with no direct motivation of hunger. But who are we to talk? We’re the species that invented guns, bombs, poison, and war.
How would you be,
If he, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O think on that,
And mercy then will breath within your lips,
Like man new made.
– Measure for Measure
The behavior exists, of course, for sound evolutionary reasons. Jays wouldn’t act this way if it wasn’t advantageous to their tribe to be able to cooperate to defend a territory, increasing their monopoly on food sources and the security of their own nests. Sociability is a potent evolutionary strategy because it enables asymetry of force that can be applied to increase one’s odds of reproduction.
Nature’s battles of beak and talon can seem harsh and brutish. And we might think the same of early humans’ conflicts of fist and stone, which became sword and spear, which became gun and missile. With jays, you can see the evolutionary logic pretty plainly, uncompromising and hard though it is. The scale is still intact: they kill that rival jay to protect their food and young. But our human applications of force have so outgrown the scale of such scenarios that they lose such purpose, lose the immediacy of motivation that serves as a limiting factor to the scope of violence.
In Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-war film, The Man I Killed, Lionel Barrymore chastises his fellow Germans who celebrated the death of young French men in World War I, thinking of the French fathers who celebrated the death of young German men when a battle went the other way. He remembers his part in this with regret, how he watched the soldiers march off to war: “I stood in front of this hotel when my son went by. He was going to his death. And I cheered…”
Jays will sometimes kill other jays. But the scale is small, the stakes personal and perceptible, and therefore understandable. We get uncomfortable when the instinct to violence is thus laid bare to sight. But is it better when that instinct is divorced from personal interest, when it exists as a self-destructive vestige that we engage when we have nothing so close to us at stake? Jays will sometimes kill other jays. But they never cheer the deaths of strangers.
With Jays, There Are Oaks
Whew. Let’s lighten up! So far, I’ve tried to give a fair hearing to three of the most common charges I’ve heard leveled against the squawkers, with increasing severity: they are loud and obnoxious, they eat small birds, they kill each other. That these facts were true, I admitted. Totum illud scelesta nego! That all of that is criminal, I deny! But I want to finish with one final item that is not merely defensive in nature, but rather a strong and vital point in the jays’ favor: they plant the oaks.
Let me introduce this briefly with one final jay behavior that we occasionally criticize them for: greedy hoarding. (The criticism seems to come when someone has put out a feeder with peanuts or mealworms for small birds, only to see the squawker clean out the offerings in a manner of minutes, stuffing his beak with a dozen mealworms at a time and taking them off out of sight.) Jays are champions of hoarding, or caching as is it less derogatorily termed, storing food items for later consumption during nature’s less abundant seasons.
There is one food item that stands out above all others in the typical jay larder: acorns. The large, heavy nuts of oak trees contain a lot of stored energy which will power the initial growth of a seedling tree. But the downside of this bulk is the difficulty of seed distribution: you can’t float on the wind like the lightweight seeds of grasses or the winged helicopters of maples. Instead, you need to enlist animal assistance, ideally via creatures that 1) will not immediately eat the acorn, 2) will bury them a few inches underground to hide them from those who would eat them and to position them appropriately for germination, and 3) will spread them out in diverse locations rather than in a centralized cache to increase the odds of reproductive success.
Who meets all these criteria? Not the insects or little birds that can’t maneuver such large seeds in their intact form, but must destroy and eat them at once. Not squirrels, who concentrate their caches near the parent tree. Only the squawkers, who can take and cache some 6,000 acorns in a season. Of these, they might recover and consume a third to a half. That’s still a prodigious feat of memory (if you buried 6,000 acorns in unmarked locations, how many could you find?). If I wasn’t so personally enthusiastic about oaks, I could well have closed with a whole section simply extolling jays for their intelligence and mental abilities. As it is, this seems even more unique and vitally important.
With jays, we have oaks; without them, we do not. In my mind, this alone should be enough to give any jay detractors pause. And it becomes even more true when you consider the big picture implications: take oaks from these communities and what would you have left? Would you have oak titmice, or chickadees, or nuthatches, or woodpeckers? Some could adapt in some degree to an altered forest composition (a real-life experiment that areas hard-hit by Sudden Oak Death will go through), but it seems likely that the populations of all would decline were the oaks to fade away.
In this sense, not only are the depredations of jays upon the eggs and nestlings of small songbirds excusable and limited, but they are actively outweighed by this service fundamental to the very existence of this community of birds and trees and all the other plants and animals that share the same web.
The novelist Jean Giono wrote a classic ecological fable entitled The Man Who Planted Trees, in which a single man diligently spends his days walking around planting acorns, until he converts a plain to a woodland, a barren landscape into one teeming with life. Ecological succession is, of course, more complex in the real world: perfect practical methods were not the point of the story. The point of the story was that planting oaks and creating life was noble work. It is work that the jays do every year, without our thanks or glorification in pop-up picture books. And not only without our thanks, but often hindered by us: various human activities, from grazing practices to the introduction of non-native annual grasses to increased rodent abundance, have been blamed for reduced reproduction in many of California’s oak communities.
In another one of Giono’s novels, a mysterious stranger appears one night and starts propounding unorthodox, mystical agricultural advice, like telling an old couple to plant hawthorn hedges around their fields instead of cultivating every square inch with wheat. It’s not practical, he admits, but:
“There’s just one thing to be said that will make it all plain to you. If you understand this, you understand the whole matter: with hawthorns, there are birds. Ahh!”
He had the air of someone who had made a point of the greatest importance.
– Jean Giono, Joy of Man’s Desiring
Got it?
Une chose seulement, pour te faire comprendre. Si tu comprends ca, tu comprends tout. Avec de l’aubépine il y a des oiseaux. Ah!
Or, for our current purposes:
If you understand this, you understand the whole thing. With jays, there are oaks. With oaks, there are birds. Ahh!
This is a fundamental fact that I cannot dismiss.
* * *
When we look at jays only from the perspective of our own interest, narrowly defined, we can find plenty to annoy us: their loud voices are irritating! They ate the eggs of “my” house finches! They committed a shocking act of cruelty before my eyes and disturbed my (fundamentally erroneous) enjoyment of nature’s tranquility! As far as day-to-day, in-person pleasantries go, the blue squawkers can be a pain.
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little…
– “Carmel Point,” Robinson Jeffers
But set aside your human interests and prejudices for a few moments. When they squawk, try to uncover their message, trace the warning, interpret the alarm. When they prey on a nest of young finches, consider the simple ladder of size that sees crows feed on the eggs of jays and chickadees on the eggs of spiders. When battle breaks out between the backyard jays and the neighboring tribe, ask what other animal has been known to kill its own kind, and how often it had better cause.
And then when you step out into the woods, beneath the canopy of a thousand oaks, ask yourself:
What seeds have I sown?
Header photo: scrub-jay practicing his acorn gathering skills with suet nuggets, by Becky Matsubara.
Jack, I love your article, though I’m still on the fence about embracing the “Blue Jay” (ha ha, I call them that all the time). Its hard for me to get past their kamimaze entry to the feeders. They are definitely bullies. However, they’re a beautiful bird.
Thanks Vicki! I made the best case for them I could – I hope I’ve at least softened your animosity towards them! And go ahead and call them blue jays, whatever the birders tell you. I’m in favor of whatever names people find most comfortable. Like squawker.
Bravo, Jack! Thanks for this excellent essay.
Thanks Chris!
Jack–The best teachers and writers have the gift of making connections that are not, on the surface, obvious or even relevant, but at a deeper level are so enlightening. Preston Sturges and squawk jays? Oak dissemination and Jean Giono? Catullus? (Do you know his sparrow poem?) In other words, you have the gift to simultaneously educate and entertain. Bravo indeed!
As for the jays themselves–just yesterday in my backyard I witnessed some of the jay behavior you describe. And I am also guilty of those antipathetical human reactions you describe. Having been so well educated (entertainingly) I will look with new eyes on these beautiful marauders.
Thanks very much for the kind comments Stephanie! I am very glad to know that someone is enjoying the Sturges, Giono, and Catullus references. (The sparrow poems were definitely Latin class mainstays, but why would I refer to a poem that was actually bird-related? Some random love poem was clearly the obvious choice for a jay essay.) I hope I’ve been as successful at influencing your opinions of jays as I was at giving you the most idiosyncratic assemblage of cultural history ever tied to a bird essay!
This is one of the best articles from so many angles I have ever read on this species. To me this is easily the best article you have ever written from my personal perspective. Well done Jack!
Fantastic article on the blue jay! Please, get on twitter so I can share Your super Birding stories!
Twitter? I struggle to communicate in any format under 3000 words. But I’m glad you liked the essay!
Whoops! My comment accidentally went on your general store comment email, I think. Hope you will find it there, Jack. Spectacular essay, thanks so much!
I did get your message, thanks very much Anne! I’m glad you enjoyed the essay!
Wow! I am a new birder and have been noticing so many new birds on my balcony feeder but the scrub jay is unmistakable! Before I knew these facts I always found this jay to be endearing, me and my significant other get excited when we hear them squawking out the window to alert their presence. I was doing research to see why they sometimes sneak up quietly to eat and came across this article! I love the way you have put so much informative information together and made an exciting read and compelling argument! Due to the nature of most animals, I excuse the behavior of this bird in general but it is extremely exciting to learn all these new pieces of information about the squawking visitor!
Hi Jack, Thank you for all the details about the squawkers. I love nature and get out almost every weekend to the Santa Monica Mountains. (Not so much now that the parks are all closed. with C-19)
Anyway, I have always had squawkers in my neighborhood, but not it seems there are a pair looking to nest and their squawking is driving me nuts as I work from home now. Is there anything I can do to get them to move to another location to nest and do their squawking. Thank you.
I’m afraid not! They’ve probably already established a nest site by now and it is illegal to disturb native bird nests (and I wouldn’t really advocate much intentional discouragement outside of the nesting season either, as the essay suggests). You seem to be well on the road to squawker acceptance though, based on your embrace of the term, so all I can suggest is the spiritual practice of taking a moment, listening to the general hubbub of spring, hearing a loud squawk, and reciting out loud the mantra “let me hear that brazen laugh!”
Hi Jack,
Are you familiar with how the birds act when one mate dies? We’ve been lucky enough to have a pair of California Scrub Jays live in our San Jose backyard for a few weeks every spring for the past 3-4 years. (Even though I have read they are not migratory.)
This year, they stuck around several weeks longer than usual, probably because we were home and providing daily peanuts. But yesterday afternoon there was only one of the pair left, and he/she seemed depressed, hiding in our grapevines behind a wooden post. No movement, no sound. Then he/she hopped onto the roof of my car for a time, motionless. That was the last we have seen of them.
Today, they’re gone. We really enjoyed having them and would like to know if you think one of them died before they totally disappeared.
Thank you!
Hi Diane, it’s hard to say exactly what’s going on based on a yesterday-to-today story. In the Bay Area, scrub-jays are here year-round, but there can be a few different kinds of local movement (young birds will eventually disperse from their parents’ territory, usually late summer and fall; apparently in low acorn years, sometimes birds will sometimes abandon their territory and wander in winter). I’d say that it’s unusual to see a distinct pair for just a few weeks in spring as a habitual pattern. Normally, if you’re seeing a pair associating together at this time of year, you would expect them to be attempting nesting in the area.
Furtive, quiet behavior at this time of year can actually be a normal sign of nesting. As with most birds, they attempt to be secretive around nest sites and the timing could be appropriate for one of the pair to be spending a lot of time incubating while the other behaves in a suddenly quiet and unsquawking manner. On the other hand, it is a dangerous world out there and things can happen!
Overall, I would always hesitate to assume death after not seeing a bird for a span of one day – more observation is needed!
I found a lot of scrub blue feathers in my back yard where the jays used to look for food but no body. I had 2 jays consistently around and sighted daily, now nothing. What killed my jay? A hawk? I feel very sad as it seemed they were building a nest.
It could have been a Cooper’s hawk, a cat, other jays – hard to say. I’m afraid it is a dangerous world out there!
That you for that thorough defense, counselor. I too carry the banner in defense of the admirable scrub jay. Closely I have watched their behaviors. They put family first, those scrub jays. I’ve seen their quite moods. I’ve gotten to know individual pairs, and occasionally fed them for years. Even now, I have a pair grace my back porch nearly every morning to check to see if I have deposited a very small handful of almonds there (I do live in almond country of the central valley of California). They take them off to hide them. And I’ve watched fascinated as they return to their caches, stare curiously at some spot or other in the back yard, take a couple of hops, peck the ground in some special place and withdraw a stored almond only to fly up to the fence top and sit there, almond clenched in claw, pecking delectable bites. And yes, coopers hawks are their mortal enemies, AS ARE HUMANS. And for those who would criticize a scrub jay for being a scrub jay, does one hate a wolf for being a wolf? A human for being a human, the most destructive animal force in the history of the world? Do the scrub jay haters spray insecticides and herbicides? Trap and kill mice and rats? Eat pork sandwiches? Anyway, I love those birds.
Could t agree more with your points Craig Harris. It seems to me we judge & disparage the species that are most like us.
Jack this made me laugh: You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, a harp to a fire-alarm audition, or a hermit thrush to a woodland-warning competition. You bring a jay. They were made for this.
Brilliant!
Thank you Jack for the very informative and entertaining article about my birds of fancy – the jays!!
We live in the bay area and have many jays visiting us for the peanuts and cookies (though we try not to feed these frequently, but they prefer cookies over peanuts lol). Over the 2 years, I have seen 2 generations of baby jays (one over each summer). The adoring parents bring their lil ones to our backyard to feed them with peanuts and drink water from the sprinklers :). The little ones are always hungry and squeaky, lol. Believe it or not but the mama bird has talked to me in a low grunted voice (the same one that I have heard her using with the lil one) to ask for food – and no I am not kidding or imagining it. Have you come across such interactive jays?
Also, I find their memories super-impressive- they keep caching their food in the backyard and just know where to go 🙂
I came across your article while searching for a feeder specifically for the jays and which would keep the rodents away. Could you please suggest one?
Thank you!
M
PS: the video was a delight to watch!
Glad you enjoyed the article. Jays certainly can be quite interactive with people and do learn to recognize individuals. For feeders, generally the best idea is to hang it somewhere the rodents can’t access and use a food that doesn’t drop on the ground, such as peanuts or suet. This could be a freestanding pole with a “squirrel baffle” (a metal disc that wraps around the pole and blocks climbing animals), hanging from a tree or arbor with a dome over the top, or sometimes directly under an eave or suction-cupped to a window (rodents can’t generally walk on directly upside-down surfaces or smooth glass, but make sure there are no nearby jumping-off points). You could also try using hot pepper foods, which rodents generally don’t like and birds are fine with, but some subset of rodents will tolerate them. You can see more tips on our store website, or come visit us in Novato.
Thank you so much for your wonderful suggestions! Going to try the hot pepper foods right away while I order the feeder. Thanks very much for the invite too ! Will check out your website for sure though not sure about the visit 🙂
Your article is splendid! I’ve been doing research for an art project featuring Scrub Jays, I mean Squawkers. I’m especially grateful for the permission to be Vulgar. Haha.
Wonderful article in support of the squawking jay! So many folks voice displeasure for the squawking. You have given me some ammo to enlighten them on the importance of jays for our ecological health. To the anti-squawkers I say – when all is silent maybe then you will appreciate the beauty of nature’s cacophony.
Thanks for your wonderful article defending the beautiful scrub jays, they are very smart birds and are very good parents caring for their young.
I have a question about the scrub jays coming to our feeder:
The number of scrub jays visiting our balcony platform feeder has grown from 1 to 5 now and we witnessed the chasing, bomb-diving and hear their squawking, would such fight go on and on?
Would a winner win at the end and chase away everyone else?
Would their fight be deadly? I pray that they can all come to eat, in peace, but they are territorial, I know.
We have tried to put several feeders at different places, away from each other, to spread out the aggression, that did not work, the first jay that “owns the territory for some years” just chased anyone visiting any one of the feeders!
Now, a new comer appears recently and is fiercely hoarding the feeder like his own! Though the first jay bomb-dived at him, he still comes and chases away other jays aggressively, and he is the newest visitor!
In your experience with scrub jays, please share your thought on how would this situation may develop.
We love to see the scrub jays eating and drinking daily, but we worry about their “safety” of being attacked or even killed by the 2 aggressive jays.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this situation we have here in California, have a nice day!
Hi Angela,
It is normal to see an increase in the number of jays at this time of year – they have probably fledged young recently. The nesting season in general is also the time of year when they are most aggressive. The nicest (and not impossible) scenario is if you are seeing a family group and the recent fledglings are chasing each other in play. Some of that does happen. But there can also be very aggressive conflicts between neighboring territorial adults. I have occasionally seen jays kill other jays, but I wouldn’t say that it’s the expected outcome. Personally, I wouldn’t generally consider that normal springtime territoriality something to make me take my feeders down, but if the conflict is continuous and extreme right around your feeder, there wouldn’t be any harm to taking down the feeder for some weeks as their aggression cools off. By August they are generally less aggressive, and they are much less so in fall once acorns become more abundant.
Thank you for such a lovely essay. I share your sentiments completely. My scrubs have me duly trained. Their squawks early in the morning let me know they’re ready for breakfast. This Spring, I watched with excitement, amazement and finally, true heartbreak, at the unsuccessful fledging of their brood outside my window. They keep me company and give me a sense of connection.
It’s interesting to me to see how one pair (“my pair” of Scrubs has stayed all year, while two pairs of Stellars had been very active at my feeder all winter, left for nesting season, and now in September, have just returned.
I love how the titmice are so brave around these bigger bothers of a different feather. They certainly get their share of the treats, and consider themselves completely up to the task of flying off with the large peanuts in the shell, half their size.