The screamer in the woods
The dandyish jay by David Profumo
‘As a singer, the Eurasian jay might be better suited to karaoke nights ’
ROguish, raucous, canny, shy and dandified, the Eurasian jay is especially visible in October, when it forages for winter caches of the acorns that give its name: Garrulus
glandarius—the talkative acorn bird. The most exotic member of our British
Corvidae, it is, with distinct regional variations, distributed across north-west Africa, siberia and into Japan. here—with an estimated sedentary population of 170,000 pairs— it’s not endangered and thrives especially in the southern woodlands of hampshire, sussex and Kent. Once, it was persecuted by preservers of game (there was a bounty of 3d per head back in george ii’s reign) and the plumage was popular with taxidermists and milliners. in 1880, the Duchess of Edinburgh sported a muff fashioned entirely from jay’s wings. The electric-blue covert feathers were also valued by flydressers for such classic Victorian patterns as the Popham and Excelsior.
The kae pie or jay piet is a secretive bird and the first you may glimpse of it is the white flash of a rump as it disappears into some woodland canopy. Just over 1ft long, it shows a back the pinkish hue of Etruscan stucco and shoulders inclining to chestnut. With its speckled erectile crest and those flashy blue wing lapels (which reflect ultraviolet light), it has the mischievous demeanour of some fairground huckster.
W. h. hudson dubbed it the ‘British Bird of Paradise’, but its head—with that murderous bill and unforgiving eye—is too thuggish to be exactly beautiful and the pronounced malar stripe over each pale cheek makes it resemble a particularly insolent, moustachioed Bulgarian waiter.
One collective noun for Garrulus is a ‘band’, but ( pace Jay-z, the hip-hop superstar) he would not make much of a lead vocalist. The rasping cry shraaik is distinctly unmusical, although henry Williamson compared it nicely to the sound of tearing linen. however, the ‘screamer of the woods’ (as it’s known in the gaelic) is a noted mimic and was once a popular cage bird; it can imitate everything from lawnmowers and sheep to insects and mewling infants and occasionally baffles predators, such as tawny owls, by echoing their calls. As a singer, it might be better suited to karaoke nights.
Chiefly arboreal, the jay prefers deciduous woodlands and shuns open spaces, although it’s adapted to urban life and is a bullying habitué of bird tables. The flight is undulating and low-level (described by one early naturalist as ‘a suddain jetting Motion’), yet it is nimble enough among branches. sometimes, you can discover adults in an ‘anting’ posture, their wings tilted open upon wood-ant nests, where the formic acid rids their plumage of parasites.
An opportunistic omnivore, the jay will take bats, beetles, mice and worms, but chiefly feeds off berries, beech mast and nuts. it has a significant penchant for the fatty acorns of Quercus ilex, which, in autumn, it stashes on the margins of mature woodland, carrying several at a time in crop and beak, and thereby contributing to the propagation of our oak forests. A single bird can bury thousands in a year—‘dig a hole’, as the Jay-z lyric goes—and this instinct is so engrained that even jays in captivity seek to emulate it.
The scritch is also a nest robber with a long rap sheet (ask any poor treecreeper or reed warbler) and remains unpopular with gamekeepers, causing a quandary as it flies out towards your peg on a pheasant drive.
in springtime, quite sizeable ceremonial assemblies of unmated birds may gather (so-called ‘crow marriages’) and males become snappily territorial, although are not really as quarrelsome as they sound. You might think Jay the lad looked like unsuitable son-in-law material, but he’s actually monogamous and uxorious, helping to build the nest and incubate the single clutch of half a dozen surprisingly small and mottled eggs.
scientists record that jays possess impressive cognitive powers and a capacious memory that allows them to feed their nestlings by retrieving food stores buried more than six months prev-iously, often at considerable distances from the nest site.
in folk wisdom, the jay is a jocular byword for any chatterer or fancily attired person— the ancient term for a parrot, popinjay, was originally ‘pope jaye’ and Aesop has a succinct fable wherein the jay primps himself up with discarded peacock feathers and is spurned by both peafowl and his own tribe (moral: ‘it’s not only fine feathers that make fine birds’). A ‘painted jay’ used to refer to what the Oxford English Dictionary delicately calls a woman ‘of light character’, to which use shakespeare puts it in Cymbeline, suggesting a lady of low italian morals.
Two local beaters on an East Anglian shoot were discussing the squire’s recent appointment to the Bench. The first asked: ‘Did you ever hear a JP?’. ‘No,’ came the reply, ‘but i once heard a heronshaw farrt.’