Jays, the Secretive Screechers
I find it ironic that one of our most colourful garden birds has a voice like fingers scraping down a blackboard. Soft-pink tones with azure-blue flashes to the wings, a tell-tale white rump and softly rounded wings in flight, Jays are unmistakable and without question the most colourful of our resident Corvids. The contrast with the harsh screeching alarm call that sounds like murder is being committed unseen deep within the woodland they habitually occupy mark Jays out as an odd mix.
Most of us may not be lucky enough to see them as a regular garden bird but early Autumn offers the best chance of catching sight or sound of one of these most secretive birds. Jays will spend much of their time in Autumn gathering and storing acorns. It has been estimated that an individual Jay may store up to 3000 acorns in a single month!
Jays store acorns by burying them which makes the task of remembering all the individual sites all the more remarkable. This acorn harvest sees them much more visible as they often fly out on occasionally long journeys to individual oak trees or hedgerows and they can appear in unfamiliar urban settings as a result. They do frequently use garden lawns as burial or cache sites for their acorns and can turn up in gardens that they would never visit at other times of the year.
If you’re lucky enough to live in an area that includes a Jay’s territory they may visit your garden, most visits are early morning and they will take peanuts and scraps. It’s fair to say though that you are much more likely to hear the commotion from an alarm call. My heard to seen ratio is about 80/20, I frequently hear the local Jays chuntering on in nearby woodland and hedges but rarely see them.
I recall attending what must have been a roost in late winter/early spring in woodland many years ago with perhaps a dozen Jays in attendance and the noise produced echoing across a misty woodland valley early in the morning was simply incredible.
***
Our Garden Birder’s Diary is written by Northumberland-based birder Alan Tilmouth who has been birdwatching for over 30 years and writing about birds in various guises for the last decade. A keen garden birdwatcher, he also manages to unearth the odd rare bird on his travels. You can find Alan on Twitter and his Facebook blog.
is it true that if you have magpies in the area you don’t have jays?
I have both Magpies and Jays visit my garden, often at the same time.
No mention that jays attack small birds.
We lost many a duckling through these predators .
You are unlucky if they are in your garden.
Are you a vegetarian/vegan? If not you’re a hypocrite as this is a Jay’s natural behaviour, unlike factory farming, reliant on cages, stealing a calves milk and overuse of anti biotics which fuel resistance in bacteria.
Angela Finnegan
We have a Jay who appears each spring in the breeding season (3 years now). This year it decided to learn how to get up to a coconut containing seed and suet. It always tried this after feeding from seed and suet on the ground. I always laugh to think of it going back to the wife and saying how hard it had been to get one piece of suet out that coconut. Photo not great but it was always to quick for me!
Common sightings of a solitary Jay in our garden. Not seen any predator activity from this colourful visitor as of yet. May the visits long continue.
Lovely bird with an overly bad reputation. Here’s a pic of a young one who just came out from having it’s hair done…
I love jays and have them in my garden most of the year. I was lucky enough to have 3 fledglings this year.
photo attached