By Alice Martin

Correspondent

The Blue Jay, with its perky crest, blue, white and black plumage and noisy calls, is a common and familiar backyard bird, but their intelligence and complex social systems distinguish them in the avian world.  That crest on their head is lowered when they are feeding or tending to nestlings and the black bridle across the face, neck and throat varies from bird to bird and helps them recognize one another.  Like the hummingbird, the Blue Jay’s feathers are dull and brown and the blue color is caused by the scattering of light through modified cells on the surface of the feather barbs. The male and female do not have any distinguishing features making it pretty difficult to tell them apart. 

Their range spans across North America from southern Canada down through the eastern and central U.S. to Florida and northeastern Texas.  They generally occur east of the Rocky Mountains but there are some that have settled in the west. Oddly enough, despite their presence in so many states, the Blue Jay is not the state bird of a single one.  Seems downright unfair, doesn’t it?

If you want Blue Jays in your yard, put out tray feeders loaded with peanuts, sunflower seeds and suet.  A bird bath will also attract them along with many other birds. If you have oak trees in or around your yard, Blue Jays will be inevitable visitors.  They are con artists and may scare other birds away by mimicking the call of hawks.  These calls may deceive other birds and cause them to forget about eating their food and flee, leaving more for the trickster.  However, Blue Jays, outside of their nesting period, are not territorial and several pairs may live in the same area.

Male Blue Jays, in their attempt to find a mate, put on a grand display of feats of flight and chase the female from tree to tree.  The female indicates that she has succumbed to his charms with a simple nod of her head, and then they deepen their bond by sharing songs and grooming one another.  They are monogamous and mate for life.  

The nest building is done by the female, but the male collects all of the materials. The nest is large enough to hold 3 to 7 green-blue eggs and is meticulously maintained.  Incubation takes about 18 days, but after hatching, the parent birds continue to feed the nestlings for another three weeks. The families are strongly bonded and the parents stick with the fledglings while they learn “how to be Blue Jays” and find their own mates.

Studies have shown that the male Blue Jays are almost exclusively the dominant members of the breeding pair, perhaps because the males are larger or more aggressive. The females rarely win an altercation.  However, just before breeding season, the males become markedly less aggressive and the females become more aggressive.  This may be attributed to “nesting phenology”, that is the energy demands shift as the female needs to consume more nutrients in preparation for the nesting season.  This brief change in behavior does not persist.  The male always resumes his dominance.  

Blue Jays have made a significant contribution to our environment.  Here follows a very simplified explanation of how.  As the glaciers retreated, the ground was laid bare.  Then fungi and algae took root, followed by tundra plants like sedges and ferns, but eventually, about 10,000 years after the ice disappeared, oak trees showed up. How did they get there? Oak trees drop acorns and the acorns don’t move from under the tree without some sort of assistance.  That’s where the Blue Jay comes in.  They actually pick the healthier, more viable acorns, break off that little cap, stuff up to five in their mouth and throat, and then fly away to “plant” them farther away from the tree to be dug up and eaten later.  They don’t remember where every acorn is, though, and as a result many of the “lost” acorns grow into trees.  Those new trees eventually produce acorns for the Blue Jays to move even further away.  If you seek more information on the web, the story of the reforestation of parts of the United States as a result of Blue Jays and other birds moving acorns and other tree seeds is astounding. 

Happy birding, everyone!