The jay: One of nature’s genuine oddities

I DON’T have a musical ear and I’ve never been good at identifying birds by their calls.

But I was walking in the wood the other day when I heard one that was unmistakable. Actually it was more than one — at least three birds high up in the canopy making a terrible racket.

It’s difficult to describe bird calls in print. I’ve just checked three books and one describes the call I heard as ‘kraih’, another as ‘shraah-shraah’ and a third as ‘skkaaaa’. All rather different, but you get the general idea — the loud, harsh and un-musical call of the jay.

I don’t see jays too often so I went stalking through the trees to try and catch a glimpse of them. The nearest one spotted me, took off from a tall ash tree and flew across a clearing in the wood. If the call is distinctive a jay in flight is absolutely unmistakable. They fly more like a butterfly than a bird, with clumsy flaps of their broad wings on a flight path that undulates up and down.

The plumage is unusual as well. I was too far away to see the brilliant blue patches on the wings but the gaudy mixture of black, white and pink and the distinctive white patch on the rump combined to give the impression of something you’d expect to come across in a tropical rain-forest rather than my local wood.

Apparently jays aren’t that rare. They’ve been recorded as resident in every county in Ireland and there are estimated to be about 10,000 pairs in the country. But jays are hard to count and I suspect this may be a estimate rather than an accurate figure. They are commoner in the east of the country than in the west, though there is some evidence that in the last hundred years they have extended their range northwards and westwards and declined in the south east. Nobody seems to know why this should be.

They live in mature woodland, deciduous and coniferous, though the ideal habitat is probably a mixture of the two. Mature woodland is the most difficult habitat for birdwatchers because the birds hide in the trees.

And jays are normally quite shy and secretive, possibly because they were persecuted by gamekeepers in the past. For these reasons they’re seldom seen on a regular basis.

But if you want to watch jays, and they are very interesting birds to watch, this is the best time of year to do it. There are two reasons for this.

THE FIRST is that the leaves are starting to fall off deciduous trees, removing a lot of the cover that jays conceal themselves in during the summer. The second is that the birds are very active in the autumn, collecting surplus food and storing it for the winter. This is exactly what the birds I was watching the other day were up to.

Gamekeepers shot and trapped jays in the past because, like their close relation the magpie, they sometimes eat the eggs and nestlings of other birds. But their main food is tree seeds — stuff like acorns, cones of spruce and pine, beech mast and ash keys. At this time of year they bury little stores of these seeds in the leaf mould on the woodland floor.

My local jays seem particularly fond of ash keys. They are a reliable form of food — crops of acorns and beech mast vary considerably from year to year.

Sometimes a jay fails to dig up its winter food store — it might not need it, it might forget where it buried it or it might die. In that case the seeds germinate and it’s believed that jays play an important role in woodland regeneration.

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