One Wild Bird at a Time by Bernd Heinrich

Author:Bernd Heinrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A blue jay carrying an acorn.

I had previously seen lone jays call from a treetop, fly off in silence, land in another treetop, call again, and repeat this pattern, thus moving in a specific direction. Now the distant jay was coming up the slope and mine flew to the eastern edge of the clearing, precisely where the other one soon arrived. They landed in the same (long since bare) red maple, but although seemingly ignoring each other made the soft whisper calls often made by couples. Then both came to my feeder, filled their throat pouches with seeds, and flew off separately, high over the forest. I realized then that a blue jay’s home area can be huge. The forest is dense, and it may normally make more sense for a pair, or birds of a group, to forage separately than together, as long as they rely on scattered small food items that must be searched out one by one. But if these two were a pair, what about an extended family, or a social group?

November 6, 2013. It was a wind-still morning, and I was in the woods before 7 a.m. I soon heard the typical long jay calls, first to the north, then the south, east, and west. After several minutes of silence I heard another call, and then yet another from a half-kilometer or more distant. I sat on a rock and waited as a noisy pair of red-breasted nuthatches in a flock of chattering chickadees passed through the woods. Suddenly a blue jay arrived and landed about two hundred meters from me, high in a huge red spruce tree. I didn’t budge. It was silent, hopping through the thickly branched top of the tree as though searching for food, as it picked here and there. A few minutes later, and without interrupting its exploration of the tangle of branches, it made a few of the usual long, loud, two-note scream calls. Sometimes it abbreviated these calls to make a series of three, varied the pitch, or slowed down or speeded up the tempo. All the while it kept hopping, pecking here and there, and foraging, without ceasing its calling.

At a distance of a kilometer or so I heard the faint call of another jay. The one I was watching paid no apparent attention to the sound, not interrupting its investigation of the twigs at its feet. In about twenty-five minutes it traveled only about three hundred meters. It made two or three different scream calls, one call with a higher pitch, and a series of lower, softer calls. I could see far into the leafless maple woods, and there was not another jay in sight. After a half-hour the solitary jay flew off silently to the northeast, from where I had heard no calling. On the face of it, it seemed to have talked to itself the whole time. But had it been heard and listened to by others?

These snapshots of a blue jay in the

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