Jays take flight from roving squirrels

LAST WEEK I wrote an article on this page about jays. I noted that jays were more numerous in the south and east of the country but that the pattern seemed to be changing, with the population slowly shifting north westwards.

My source for this information was David Cabot’s excellent book Irish Birds. In it he writes: “The jay has apparently been extending its range northwards and westwards since the beginning of the century, while becoming scarcer in the south-east, where its absence from suitable breeding habitats is difficult to explain.”

Although my copy of the book is dated 2004 the first edition came out in 1995, so I was pretty sure that the century he was referring to was the 20th not the 21st .