Jays

Most of our meals are accompanied by the sound and often the sight of blue jays. The window next to our kitchen table faces a neighbor’s house with a low, steep roof the jays favor for hunting insects among the fallen leaves, sticks and pine needles that accumulate there. Also, jays are the only birds bold enough to challenge the squirrels at the neighbors’ bird feeder, hanging from the branch of a magnolia in their front yard. The mourning doves and more timid species feed on seeds that drop to the ground.

I have been reading The Singing Life of Birds, by Donald Kroodsman, though “skimming” is a more honest verb. While he is an earnest, exhaustively systematic researcher, Kroodsman writes ploddingly and is incapable of self-editing. He reports virtually everything that happens while he stalks and records birds in the field, regardless of how marginal its relevance or interest. He makes the taxonomic point that jays and other corvids, like crows, are songbirds, though the sounds they produce make that difficult to accept. He calls them “a songbird without a song.” It’s impossible to quote Kroodsman at length with a clear conscience, but here goes:

“I’m convinced there’s something deep and rich here, that spending time studying the pairs at a few nests and listening to these jays awake will provide a window on their minds. It is to understand their minds, after all, that is my goal, as I use their sounds only as a tool to that end.”

Kroodsman, like most writers about birds, uses the adjective “raucous” to describe the sounds of the jay. I don’t hear that. To me, jays sound as though they are kvetching – if not about a squirrel or a trespassing human, then about existence in general. They remind me of a group of old men I used to see playing chess, or at least kibitzing while others played, in Washington Park, in Albany, N.Y. Thoreau memorably described the blue jay’s song as an “unrelenting steel-cold scream,” and that too seems exaggerated. Their fearlessness and irritated loquacity make jays more conspicuous than other birds, as though they were permanent guests on talk radio.

To hear the calls of jays and other birds, go to the web site of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which describes itself as “the world’s largest archive of animal sounds.” The sounds of only a handful of species are available online, free of charge, but the Cornell collection has recordings of sounds produced by 160,000 species of animals, including about 67 percent of the world’s birds, and a growing assortment of insect, fish, frog and mammal sounds. When I played the eerie moan and quill-rattle of a porcupine, my cat ran under the bed.
Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about jays:

No Brigadier throughout the Year
So civic as the Jay.
A Neighbor and a Warrior too,
With shrill felicity
Pursuing Winds that censure us
A February Day,
The Brother of the Universe
Was never blown away –
The Snow and he are intimate –
I've often seen them play
When Heaven looked upon us all
With such severity
I felt apology were due
To an insulted sky,
Whose pompous frown was Nutriment
To their Temerity.
The Pillow of this daring Head
Is pungent Evergreens –
His larder -- terse and Militant –
Unknown -- refreshing things –
His Character -- a Tonic –
His Future -- a Dispute –
Unfair an Immortality
That leaves this Neighbor out –