Jay

My 'Nature Notes' column for the coming month :-

I opened my bedroom curtains the other day to find myself almost eye-to-eye with a jay that was perched on the roof of one of my garden sheds. To my surprise, it didn’t take flight immediately but stared back at me for a while before moving on. Jays are very handsome birds, with a mainly pinkish-buff body, a distinctive blue wing patch, and flashes of white on the wings and tail that are clearly seen when the bird takes flight. It has a bit of a crest, too, which is streaked black and buff, and something of a black moustache marking either side of its beak.

The woodland to the back of us is ideal territory for a jay, particularly as it contains a number of oak trees. Jays are omnivorous feeders and therefore share some of the unpopularity of the magpie; they are not above stealing the eggs and nestlings of other birds, and they will also take earthworms, insects and small mammals, but their main food is the product of trees, with acorns top of their list. This bird is in fact sometimes called the ‘acorn jay’, and jays habitually bury acorns as food for winter. ‘How do they remember where they put them?’ you might ask, and the short answer is that they don’t, or not always, anyway - so their burying of acorns is very helpful to the tree, helping to ensure new seedlings can grow some distance away from the parent tree.

The jay’s Latin name of Garrulus glandarius reminds us that this is a bird more often heard than seen (though see my note below). It is indeed garrulous, and will greet intruders onto its patch with a harsh and raucous call that is quite distinctive. If seen in flight, the white markings on tail and wings are distinctive, but so too is the flight itself, undertaken in a slow and somewhat cumbersome style, with rather laboured beats of its rounded wings.

Like that of the magpie, though to a lesser extent, the jay population has been increasing, and, though generally regarded as a wary bird, in my experience this is far less the case than it used to be. Visiting my daughter recently on the Warwickshire / Worcestershire border I had close encounters with two or three jays as I walked along the country lane near her home, and they didn’t seem particularly shy at all. Certainly you can get much closer to jays these days than in the past. (That visit was also notable for a very close encounter with a grass snake, which slithered by, on a pleasant sunny morning, just a couple of feet away from where I was standing looking over a gate. More on grass snakes another time, perhaps.)

Jays build untidy nests of twigs, lined with hair, in trees, and lay between five and seven eggs. The young birds spend about three weeks in the nest before fledging. Jays are residents of the UK and do not generally move very far from home. They can be found through most of the country, but are absent from the far north. Some continental birds, often lighter in colour, may arrive in winter.