Blue Jays Can Be Quite A Little Handful A pair of blue jays feasts on sunflower seeds on the Lukes' platform feeder. One of these days, mark my word, the weather is going to take a turn for the better. Spring birds will begin to arrive and suddenly the early mornings will be laced with the lovely courtship singing of various species. Past experiences tell me that it invariably will be either the robins or mourning doves that will sing their soothing serenades in all directions well before sunrise. If the blue jay has its own early hour musical song, either I have not heard it, can’t hear it or I don’t recognize it. Not until the first morning seeds are put into the feeders does this flamboyant freeloader seem to come to life. A loud piercing "jay-jay-jay," discordant and clamorous, brings all the other birds to sudden attention. So help me those jays must take turns watching the front yard every morning so the whole tribe can be alerted to the handout. What a flock of obstreporous buccaneers. On the other hand these important alarm callers and feathered "freebooters" are downright handsome. Should just the correct angle of sunlight reflect from their feathers to your eyes, brilliant shades of blue and violet come into play. Like the indigo buntings and bluebirds, the feathers of the jays contain no blue pigment. Their cellular structure is such that, at the proper angle, they only appear to be blue. Actually most are of various shades of gray. A famous English ornithologist, following his first visit to the U.S., was asked what his favorite bird seen in our country was. You guessed it – it was the blue jay! This gaudy, foot-long, slow-flying creature is about 75% vegetarian. Undoubtedly many of our present-day oaks and beeches were planted by jays. Plenty of the seeds and nuts this pilfering rascal hides are never found and eaten. Like the red-winged blackbirds, European starlings, brown-headed cowbirds and grackles, the blue jay is extremely adaptable and has, in a sense, welcomed the arrival of people onto the scene. Changes that we have brought about have definitely favored the jays, particularly in their food finding. To watch a half dozen or more blue jays at the feeders simultaneously, each one cramming seed after seed into its gullet, is almost more than one human can stand. Usually a tap on the window scatters them – momentarily. Some are well conditioned to our presence and absolutely and disgustingly disregard our protests. Our snowless winter through this past December and quite a bit of January kept more jays here than in most previous years when snow covered their usual supply of food. With the ground being open they had little trouble finding waste corn in the fields and plenty of beechnuts and acorns in the hardwoods. It wasn’t until after the arrival of snow that suddenly the daily number of jays to our feeders virtually exploded. At least 15 or more appeared each early morning. Finally, out of pure frustration, I fashioned wire cages, having openings large enough to admit chickadees, tree sparrows, juncos and other small birds, to place on top of our two platform feeders. Now the pushy jays, along with the squirrels, are forced to find their food on the ground. A large sugar maple, having branches that come within 15 or so feet of our living room window, often provides a jay with a suitable site on which to crack open a sunflower seed. It’s interesting how it uses its tail to balance itself as it grasps a sunflower seed between its toes and hammers away with its bill in the process of getting at the meat of the seed. I’ve often wondered if they ever miss and end up with a bruised toe. Believe me, having handled many dozens of jays during the years I banded birds, this bird is no weakling. When you have a jay in the hand you know you’ve got a hold of a bird! School children who came to learn at the sanctuary in past years, and who always were thrilled to participate in banding birds, would never have labeled the jays as troublesome. Quite to the contrary. They thoroughly enjoyed these fascinating creatures. Usually we’d manage to trap at least a half dozen jays during the course of a morning and every one of them had a different "personality." One would be extremely docile, easy to handle and would constantly eye us with unusual interest, never uttering a sound even when it flew away. Another jay fought, scrapped and bit for every feather it was worth. What a lingo it gave us upon departing from that circle of "dangerous" youngsters! It’s downright fun thinking about the personalities of birds and other animals, but one must be cautious in denouncing an entire species, such as the blue jay, based upon one or two experiences with them. This brings me to wonder if the birds chirp and chatter about the "birdonalities" of people! This column appeared in the Door County Advocate on 03/14/2003. © Copyright 2003 Roy Lukes. All rights reserved.