Jay-watching
I really like to study the study of birds. I think that the history of biological discovery is so fascinating. Two hundred and sixty-four years ago the investigation of bird life on the eastern edge of North America was just in its infancy. The great pioneers of North American ornithology, John James Audubon and Alexander Wilson, weren’t even born in the 1740s.
Neither were William Clark nor Meriwether Lewis. It would be more than 60 years before their trek into the West would open the way for biological exploration of the unique bird life we take for granted here. Yet all four of these individuals were so important to the early study of birds that each had newly discovered birds named for them.
But in 1741, a German doctor and naturalist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, went on a Russian expedition to Alaska on a ship captained by Vitrus Bering. Commander Bering had a sea named in his honor – probably due to the fact that he had the historical, if not personal, good fortune to die on that expedition, in that sea.
Dr. Steller survived, and more than half a century before Lewis and Clark saw it, discovered a bird unique to the West. It was a jay. A jay, blue in color, but not in name, for it was quite different from the blue jay already commonly known in eastern North America.
Whereas the eastern species was bright in white and pale blue, Dr. Steller’s jay, known these days as Steller’s jay, was black and dark blue. Both were crested but Steller’s was black-crested, sooty black-backed, smokey blue underneath and black-barred on the tail and wings.
Further, whereas Audubon has just two bird species named after him, and Lewis and Clark only one each, Dr. Steller has been so honored with three birds – an eider, a sea eagle and the jay – and several mammals, including a sea lion. Bering did get a sea, but again, he had to die for that.
Of course Steller did not know it at the time, but his jay was to be later found from Alaska south throughout the mountainous areas of the West and even down through Mexico to Central America. Here in North Idaho we can depend on hearing, if not seeing, Steller’s jays in just about any area with a good stand of coniferous trees – even in the city.
As far as jays are concerned, Steller’s jay is pretty similar to the other nine species in the United States and Canada. All have similar biology and behavior. All can be described as raucous, all are flocking species when not nesting, all have complex behaviors and all have complicated systems of communication.
In short, all are quite intelligent, as far as bird brains go. In fact, the whole family to which the jays belong – along with the crows, ravens, magpies and nutcracker (William Clark’s nutcracker) – the Corvidae, is thought to be about the most intelligent of all bird families.
It’s no wonder this group tends to be so aggravating to humans. There’s nothing we humans detest so much in animals as intelligence. I think that it unsettles us somehow.
Jays are not only smart, but they are also good imitators. Their favorite routine usually involves some bird calls, with the red-tailed hawk among their best. However, they have also been known to mimic lawn sprinklers and creaky doors. It’s no wonder they borrow other sounds. Their own call is usually described with terms such as harsh and unmusical.
To me, however, the shook-shook-shook call of a Steller’s jay in the forest, along with wind in the trees and running water, is beautiful music. It’s one of those sounds that can easily bring back so many memories of peaceful, carefree hikes in the woods. It’s truly one of my favorite forest-species calls.
In North Idaho we also have the gray jay and Clark’s nutcracker but both are actually rather distant jay relatives. In western Oregon and Washington there is the western scrub jay, and in central Oregon there is the pinyon jay.
The blue jay of the East, Steller’s jay’s kissing cousin, is actually becoming more and more a jay of the West, too, especially in fall and winter. There are currently numerous reports of blue jays throughout the Inland Northwest.
These two jays are genetically similar enough that they do hybridize in areas where their breeding ranges overlap – including downtown Coeur d’Alene. I’m sure that it’s that crazy crest they both wear. No other jays have it.
We only see blue jays seasonally because they are a migratory species – the only migratory jay. Our Steller’s jays pretty much stay put. If winters are particularly bad in the mountains, or if food is particularly scarce one year, Steller’s jays will make elevational moves.
During such winters we may have more jays in town, but, as I mentioned before, Steller’s jays are a species you can expect at your backyard feeder just about any year, or any time of year. And if you hear or see one, you can bet there are more close at hand.
Since they don’t migrate and since they are a social species, Steller’s jays tend to hang out as family groups, often with a dozen or more members. Get them riled and you’ll see what a jay family can do. They go from raucous to aggressive, even attacking, en masse, hawks and owls. In fact, one of the surest ways to locate roosting owls is to find an especially agitated flock of jays.
During breeding season, however, jays are solitary and silent. In Coeur d’Alene, in a several-block radius, I know that there is a nesting Steller’s jay/blue jay pair. I have seen courting behavior between them. I have seen their hybrid offspring. But I cannot find their nest. When I see them in the spring, they are skulking, not screaming.
Steller’s jays are omnivores, as are the other corvids. They eat mostly pine seeds in our area but take a lot of insects and spiders in the warmer weather. They can also kill small rodents and often rob other species’ nests. In winter, they can rely on caches of seeds and nuts that they had earlier squirreled away.
And their memories have been shown to be better than those of squirrels, and better than mine. Our red squirrels cache in large accumulations that are easy to get to and hard to miss. Jays hide individual nuts and know where they are months later. I can’t remember where I put my glasses five minutes ago.
If I were to really get into a study of these birds, however, what I’d find fascinating about Steller’s jays are the differences one finds if you look at individual birds from throughout the range of the species. Birds from different areas look different. This is the study of “geographic variation.”
If you give me a specimen, I can tell you if it lived on the coast or in the Rocky Mountains. I can even tell whether or not the specimen was from the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. To me, this geographic variation is an incredible phenomenon.
The jays from the Queen Charlotte Islands are the largest and the darkest. Their heads are almost entirely black. Jays from the coastal mountain areas, the Pacific race, are also darker-headed than ours, but they have blue streaks on their foreheads and above their eyes.
Our Steller’s jays, the interior West race, have paler backs and longer crests than the coastal forms. They also have facial streaks but they are distinctly white. The white eyebrow mark is especially obvious.
This type of variation is often categorized by describing distinct subspecies. Overall there are 17 recognized and named subspecies of Steller’s jay throughout its range. This way of describing their variation is, however, deceptive. Each subspecies is not entirely distinct as a group. Instead, this jay variation is clinal, or gradual.
Whereas a jay from the coast is darker, with blue facial streaks, and one from here is paler, with white facial streaks, jays from central British Columbia, where the two groups merge geographically, also merge in these color characteristics. And the merging is gradual, tending more toward one extreme or the other, depending upon whether one looks East or West.
In the past couple of hundred years we have come a long way in our studies of birds. In the days of Dr. Steller, the excitement was in the discovery of previously unknown species. Today such discoveries, at least in the bird world, are rare.
Instead, now we are asking questions about how and why birds do what they do – how they can find their way from here to there in migration, how their social structures have formed and why, and what geographic variation can tell us about how species change.
It remains a fascinating world of birds. There is still so much to study. But the study of the study can be fun, too. Just imagine if Bering hadn’t died – what would the sea be called today? And just imagine if Dr. Steller had stayed comfortably at home in Germany. What would you think of a Sacajawea jay?