The famous american blue jay. Iconic bird, famous. Star of cartoon network’s Regular Show. Mascot of Toronto stickball. Festive blue and white raiment with an artful dash of black stripes, white face with black dot eyes for Hello Kitty points. Unfuckwithable.
And indeed, I’ve never really seen them. I’ve glimpsed them briefly at a distance, only able to tell what they were by context, and by my brother calling out when he saw them. I get the impression our california scrub jays are less shy. After all, I’ve seen them on my lawn and the roof of our carport. I spent a combined total of a few weeks in Kansas and only saw the more famous jays flitting around trees and hiding the second my brother spoke.
So technically, yes, there are on my life list. But I’m not personally familiar with them. Talking about jays more broadly, they’re the more graceful, slightly smaller cousins of the crow family, with similarly harsh calls and opportunistic habits. They’re often blue. It’s a… oh what was the term… poly-somethin’… polyphyletic. It’s an artificial grouping like “fish,” not a category describing a natural grouping based on common descent. As I discovered while looking at info about canada jays, some are more closely related to magpies. And magpies aren’t even a natural grouping! Whatever.
I’d talk about Canadian stickball but I don’t know a thing about it. How about Regular Show? That was a cartoon on the TBS-owned cartoon network, about a blue jay and a raccoon that work incompetently for a city park? If I remember correctly. Mordecai and Rigby were their names. They got up to hijinks that would not be terribly out of place in a 1980s comedy movie, but leaning more into the unreality possible in drawn media.
They also had relationship problems, which is weird for a kid’s show, right? The raccoon was dating a beaver and the blue jay was dating a red and white bird that was shaped like blue jays are shaped in that universe. Does that make her a red jay? Is there such an animal? Googled, seems it’s an occasional name for Cardinals. Nonsense! I refuse.
Anyway, the blue jay breaks up with the red jay and dates a storm cloud for a while. I don’t know if that show was at all watchable for ten year olds, but it worked OK for me circa age forty, watching basic cable while I cooked, back at the old apartment.
That’s all. I’m done.
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A couple years ago my wife decided she wanted the local crows to be less frightened of her. I don’t really know why. She said she saw posts on Instagram where people had befriended crows and the crows brought them stuff, like shiny bits of paper and five-dollar bills. She also had just finished watching Game of Thrones for the third time, and I understand crows play a part in that show (I’ve only seen short bits of that show, not my bag). Whether it was the “neat-o” factor or cupidity, she figured that setting out unshelled peanuts at the same time every day for the crows to eat would attract and befriend them.
What she didn’t account for was the other wildlife. It’s not like she could expect a sign, reading “Crows Only”, to be respected by the chipmunks, squirrels, possum, and racoons. We watched one chipmunk frantically picking up one peanut at a time, carrying it to a safe spot under some brush, and rushing back to get another. That poor chipmunk must have been exhausted.
But the birds who really took an interest in the unshelled peanuts were the blue jays. A jay would swoop down, grab a nut, land on a branch of the walnut, shell and eat the nuts, then go again. For variety, the jay might take the peanut to the bird-bath and give it a dunk while shelling it. I laughed a bit at the peanut shells all over the lawn, I didn’t care as the lawn mower would shred them.
My wife never succeeded in befriending any crows, or jays for that matter. As we discussed at the time, the key to convincing a wild animal that you mean no harm is to provide food, in the same type, amount, location, and time every day. My wife often switched the time and location of her peanut gifts, and even missed days. Eventually she tired of the attempt.
Yet, we had great pleasure in watching animals discover, and react, to the occasional peanut bonanza appearing in our lawn.
We have blue jays here. Not a huge fan. First, they are loud and squawky. Second, they are bullies and pigs in our platform feeder. They will chase away all of the other birds (chickadees, cardinals, various finches, nuthatches, etc.) because they are larger. Then they will start thrashing about in the seeds, apparently looking for just the right seed, while tossing numerous seeds out of the feeder. I imagine that the chipmunks and squirrels like this behavior.
When I see blue jays in the feeder, I will chase them away. Within seconds, the feeder will be filled with chickadees and the other small birds who were chased out. I contrast the blue jay feeding style with that of the chickadee, nuthatch, and titmouse, each of which tend to fly in, quickly grab one seed, immediately fly off to a nearby branch to eat it, and then repeat the process. And then there are the mourning doves who fly in and just sit on the seeds for extended periods, appearing clueless to all that is happening around them.
Plenty of blue jays around here in Vermont. As jimf says, they’re pretty nasty in many ways, and tyrannize the feeders. But they’re also kind of useful, as they are generally the bird that gives alarm calls when danger (including people) approaches. They’re also pretty good mimics. Some years ago a local person, who liked birds, rescued an injured one and kept it in a cage. Two very bluejay events occurred. One was that its cage was too close to that of a cockatiel, and it somehow managed to reach in and rip one of the poor cockatiel’s wings off! The other was that it learned to imitate the electronic ringing of the telephone, summoning its gullible mistress numerous times.
We gave up on feeders here many years ago, mostly because they were attracting rats. They’re generally frowned on here by local wildlife folks because they also attract bears. A few years ago, there was a widespread “human interest” sort of story, when the state’s then governor was roused in the middle of the night by a bear at his feeder, and went out to chase it away, thus revealing that he slept in the raw. A nearby friend, who was unwilling to give up feeding birds, had a constant battle with a local bear, which was able to bend or uproot the feeder poles. She finally had to resort to bringing them into the house at night.
Yeah, I’ve seen blue jays as well here in Toronto; nearly got within arm’s reach of one at one point. (It was sitting in a tree on the York University campus as I walked by.) They are loud, as jimf mentioned.
@flex:
My mother sets out full peanuts in the shell for the jays; though, given she’s on the West Coast, those are Steller’s jays, not blue jays. Blue and black rather than blue and white. And yeah, as you say, the jays tend to wander off and shell the peanuts. The peanuts are always in one specific bird feeder so the smaller birds can use the other one without getting harassed quite so much. The mourning doves usually just pick up what got spilled onto the ground by the more energetic birds in the feeder.
flex – that crow story didn’t end well. the family that did that was in an affluent neighborhood and they went big for it, drawing huge crowds of misbehaving crows to the area. it sounded like the case against being a big-time crow friend was not just NIMBYism.
i’m glad to get the haps on the birds i don’t know much about. thanks y’all for chiming in, for good or ill.
the ill reminds me of this incident
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