Jay

Garrulus glandarius

Jays are somewhat paradoxical birds.

A crow, and yet colourful, they have one of the most sought after feathers of any British bird - that extraordinary blue they carry on their wings - and yet make one of the least enjoyable sounds (much more crow-like there - all a bit Jurassic Park).

And despite being on the larger side, and despite being pink, blue and more, they can be rather difficult to see.

Jays are not rare birds, but inconspicuous enough that many people have no idea what they’re looking at when they see one for the first time. (I once set up a website called ‘It’s a Jay’ because this is seemingly always the answer to photographs posted on Facebook and Twitter with the question ‘what’s this bird?’) 

The Jay is also the crow that’s most closely tied to woodland. Their relationship to the oak tree is a particularly striking example of symbiosis between species, with Jays responsible for transporting and planting acorns over a wide area.

A few autumns ago the two unremarkable-seeming holm oak trees close to the centre of our town produced a bumper crop of acorns. I started to notice Jays visiting over a period of a few weeks. I gradually realised that it wasn’t just a couple of repeat visitors, but many birds, coming from all directions, and they would take several at a time and disappear again over the houses to bury them. 

It’s thought that a single adult Jay can bury several thousand acorns each autumn, to keep as supplies for the winter, and they choose little markers for each each acorn, often an emerging piece of bramble or blackthorn. The acorns that the Jay forgets about or is unable to retrieve in the future recruit an enormous amount of new oaks into the landscape, some of them well protected by the thorny marker they grow alongside for the first few years. 

Given how much time they spend digging around on the forest floor, or in the canopy of oaks, it’s perhaps not surprising that Jays often go unseen. But that harsh call, a familiar sound in the woods, can be our ticket to finding more of them.