Yesterday I announced that this is National Blue Jay
Awareness Month, and immediately got an email complaining that I wasn’t making
it National Steller’s Jay Awareness Month. My program has a fundamental bias
toward Eastern species because I’ve only lived in the East. I’ve seen
thousands of times more Blue Jays than Steller’s Jays, and I prefer talking
about things I know about. But a lot of people do listen to my radio show via
podcast or look at my blog, which has the scripts, and I have indeed seen my
share of Steller’s Jays, so today we make a poor attempt to give equal time to
a Western bird.
The first thing I noticed about Steller’s Jay, long before I
ever saw one, was how “Steller” was spelled, in my field guide.
The bird is
quite handsome—darker than a blue jay, some populations with deep blue crests,
others with blackish brown, but all with virtually no white in their plumage. They’re
certainly striking birds, worthy of the appellation “stellar,” but the
name comes from Georg Steller, the ship naturalist on a Russian explorer’s ship
in 1741, who collected and described many of the animals he encountered on an Alaskan island.
He knew the expedition had reached America because the dark crested jay he saw
was so similar to a picture of the Blue Jay he’d seen in Mark Catesby’s 1731
book The Natural History of Carolina,
and it was nothing like any of the birds of the boreal forests of Siberia. Steller
collected a specimen—a scientific way of saying he shot and stuffed one—but it
was lost when the expedition was marooned on Bering Island. His field notes survived,
and were detailed enough that the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin
officially described the species using his notes. Steller’s sea lion and
Steller’s Sea-Eagle are also named for Georg Steller, which is spelled
s-t-e-l-l-e-r.
Both of North America’s only crested jays are noisy birds
and excellent mimics, and are the only New World jays that use any mud in their
nest construction. Steller’s Jay is tightly associated with coniferous forests,
and far more focused on people than the Blue Jay. My first experiences with it
happened within minutes of arriving at campgrounds in the West when my
sister-in-law and I took a trip in 1979. Two other corvids, the Gray Jay and
Clark’s Nutcracker, came in almost instantly and were alighting on my hands
within minutes when I offered peanuts. The jays were more standoffish, but they
readily swooped in and grabbed anything I tossed out. We stayed at the
campground in Yellowstone for three nights, which was long enough to get one
Steller’s Jay to finally alight on my hand for food.
Now feeding birds in national
park campgrounds is no longer permitted, so Steller’s Jays don't consider us an
easy source of food anymore. When Russ and I were in the Grand Canyon last
fall, the Steller’s Jays we encountered didn’t pay the least bit of attention
to us.
The West is, overall, a harsher and drier environment than
the East, and many birds are more opportunistic than related Eastern species. In
this case, Steller’s Jays are far more predatory than Blue Jays. Almost 90
percent of an adult Blue Jay’s diet is vegetal, and most of the animal matter
is insect, but Steller’s Jays take more meat not just to feed their young but
to eat outright themselves—they even kill and eat small adult birds such as
juncos and nuthatches. Although they can be just as loud as Blue Jays, they
aren’t in the habit of squawking at every little thing, because when they do
spot danger, they often hope to capitalize on it themselves. And their dark
plumage helps them hide within the shadows of the forest. It takes a bit more
work to notice them, and I’ve yet to take a decent photo of one, but this
handsome, spunky jay is quite worth searching out.
