The Fascination of Birds by William Young

Author:William Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

48. JAY

A Bird in the Hand

Having a bird in the hand occasionally allows you to notice a behavior you never would have known about otherwise. On a bird-banding trip, a friend and I caught a Blue Jay. When my friend held the bird, it put its head back and pointed its bill straight upward. We later caught another jay who did the same thing. No other species we caught exhibited similar behavior when held the same way. Bitterns, stocky-looking herons who live in marshes, point their bill into the air and stay still when trying to escape detection. Their posture and plumage provide effective camouflage when they stand among reeds, but they try the same trick when standing in an open area. Perhaps the jay behavior is an instinctive posture to try to become less conspicuous when confronted with danger.

During migration and the nesting season, birds often do things by instinct that seem inappropriate. One spring, I saw a female American Robin on a path, and she was crouching down as if simulating the brooding of eggs. She would walk a bit and then crouch down again. In the same park during spring migration, I saw a Prothonotary Warbler gathering nesting material. This species does not breed in the park, and no potential mates were there. Migratory birds often exhibit territorial behavior such as singing from a perch or chasing others of the same species, even though they have not yet reached the area where they intend to establish a territory and breed.

The jay is the only bird whose name is a letter of the alphabet. There are about fifty jay species in the world. They are related to crows and ravens but are generally smaller, sleeker, and more colorful. Magpies are in the same family, and they look a lot more like jays than crows and ravens do. The word “jay” comes from an Old French word gai, and the Italian word for magpie is the similar gaza. A diminutive form of gaza is gazette, and it is thought that the publications called gazettes (such as my university’s alumni magazine) got their name from cheap publications in Venice during the Renaissance that were intended for people who chattered like magpies. The connection with the dissemination of news is maintained in the noun of assemblage for these birds, which is a tidings of magpies.

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