Everyday in NH
Blue Jay
Cyanocitta cristata · Crows and Jays (Corvidae)
- Status
- Year-round resident; big visible migration along ridges and the coast in fall
- Length
- 9.8–11.8 in
- Regions
- Coast · Merrimack · Lakes · The Whites · Conn. River
Couldn't load a clip just now —listen on xeno-canto ↗
What you notice first
A loud, slurred "jay! jay!" scream — or a dead-on imitation of a Red-shouldered Hawk that clears every other bird off the feeder for a jay to move in.
Voice
The harsh jay scream, a musical "queedle-queedle" like a rusty pump handle, plus hawk mimicry and a surprising repertoire of soft clicks and whispers near the nest.
Where & when
Oak and beech woods, suburbs, feeders — year-round. September and October, loose flocks stream south past Pack Monadnock and down the seacoast, sometimes a few hundred in a morning.
People underrate the Blue Jay because it is loud and always around. Watch one for ten minutes and that changes. They plant oaks — a single jay caches thousands of acorns each fall, carrying up to five at a time in the throat and gullet, and the ones it forgets become trees. Northern oak forests moved north after the last ice age at roughly the speed a jay flies.
The blue isn’t pigment. There is no blue pigment in any North American bird; the colour is structural, scattered by the feather’s microstructure, which is why a jay feather looks grey-brown when you backlight it.
In fall the migration is real and visible: jays don’t like crossing big water, so they pile up along the coast and the ridgelines, riding the same northwest winds the hawks use.