Late last fall, I was intrigued by a flock of 14 blue jays at my feeder. I regularly host jays gathering food for winter, but this was an unusually large troupe for my yard and it wasn’t behaving like my typical fall flocks.
In autumn, blue jays often cache seeds. They’ll gulp down 50 sunflower seeds or more, then hide them somewhere nearby when they think no other blue jay is looking.
These guys didn’t seem to be doing that. I figured it meant they weren’t planning to stick around for the winter. I was wrong.
Blue jays are members of the Corvid family, which also includes crows, ravens, and magpies. Corvids are smarter than most birds and politicians.
It’s a good thing blue jays are intelligent, because otherwise hawks would eat them all.
Blue jays are slow flyers. They’re noisy. They are terrible at hiding. They make themselves obvious targets. They are just the right size meal for a Cooper’s hawk.
Still, since they are abundant from here to the Rockies, they must be doing something right.
It’s hard to sneak up on a blue jay. They perch in the open where they can spot danger. They gather in groups, where many eyes watch for trouble. When trouble appears, they warn each other.
In fact, their squawking warns the whole forest.
When bravery is needed, blue jays answer the call. In nesting season, they will risk death to harass hawks and owls, convincing them to leave. They’ll swoop on any terrestrial predator that gets close to the nest. Outdoor cats are the leading human-related cause of death.
Blue jays often mate for life and stay together year-round. An experienced pair is more adept at managing threats. Tight family bonds keep the kids around long enough for their parents to teach them how to survive in a hawk-eat-jay world.
Blue jays are surprisingly meek for their size. Woodpeckers, cardinals, grackles and mourning doves easily shoulder them aside on the bird feeder. They try to bully smaller birds, but they barely intimidate chickadees and nuthatches. Small finches often stand their ground against them.
But blue jays have a trick up their sleeves, or they would if they had sleeves. They are excellent mimics. They do a red-shouldered hawk imitation that is better than most real hawks I’ve heard. Their broad-winged hawk impression is almost as good.
Rather than barging into a feeder, spoiling for a fight, they try to scare other birds into thinking a hawk is nearby. I’ve never seen other feeder birds panic when the blue jays pull this trick, but I assume it works because they keep doing it.
Vocal versatility is perhaps the blue jays’ true superpower. They make many different noises, indicating a complex language that supports their highly social communities. They even change these calls when unfamiliar jays wander into their territory.
Blue jays also communicate with their crests, raising and lowering them depending on their attitudes toward each other. A raised crest indicates agitation, whether alarmed or annoyed. When feeding together or feeding young, they lower the crests to avoid conveying aggression.
When there’s a crowd of jays hogging the feeder, their crests may be partially raised to say they won’t be pushed around, but not raised so far as to start a fight.
There are 10 jay species in North America. Only blue jays migrate, and then only sporadically. Big flocks are sometimes seen headed south, especially where natural features such as shorelines force them to concentrate. Along the Great Lakes, migrating flocks may contain hundreds of jays.
Most blue jays stay local year-round, though they may move around somewhat to adjust to winter conditions. Last year, they almost completely vacated the North Maine Woods, moving closer to suburbia where food was more plentiful.
This year, mild weather and abundant natural food kept more of them back in the woods.
Acorns are one of the jays’ favorite foods. They can carry up to three in their throats. Naturally, they tend to hang around oak trees. I have several in my yard.
So here I am, still hosting 14 blue jays who stayed in my neighborhood when I thought they wouldn’t. They predicted correctly.
There are lots of acorns on the ground not covered by three feet of snow. There’s more natural food still in the treetops.
They’re fat and happy, and somehow, they knew they would be.