Dan's Feathursday Feature: Blue Jay

Still today after so many years, when I hear the shrill scream of a Blue Jay I think of my grandparents.

I grew up in the small city of Trenton, Michigan, about twenty miles south of Detroit. My paternal grandfather, who died of TB when I was two, had long managed a butcher shop/produce store in Trenton, and it was there that my parents bought a tiny three-bedroom single-floor house with lawn and garage. Our house was part of the new-housing boom following the Korean War, the boom that built America’s burgeoning suburbia with the promise of a home for every family.

I think it was our neighborhood that coined the expression “Keeping up with the Jones’s.” One family on our block got a television; then every other household soon had one. A couple years later, someone bought a color TV, and so did everyone else. Ours was ensconced in a long, low console with a record player on one side, TV in the center and shelves on the right for the 33, 45 and 78 RPM records. Our house was one of the first to have a washing machine, because my dad owned a laundromat in Wyandotte. He saw the writing on the wall and sold the business just in time, before everyone owned their own washing machines and had little need for a laundromat.

From the outside, there was little to distinguish our house from the hundreds of cookie-cutter-identical houses around us—except for a large Chinese elm in our back yard that somehow had survived the slash and burn approach to neighborhood development of the time. It was a great tree for climbing, and my sister, brother and I spent many hours hanging out in its branches. I do not recall ever seeing a bird in that tree—partly because I didn’t pay much attention to birds when I was a child, but also probably because there just were not many birds at all in that new, sterile suburb. This follows logically from the fact that there probably were no insects, either, thanks to the DDT and other insecticides that the city sprayed from roving pick-up trucks. I remember following the trucks on our bikes, gleefully enveloped in the chemical fog that spewed from the spray trucks as they slowly cruised our streets. I was eight when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring woke us up to the danger of those chemicals.

At the time, I knew nothing of Rachel Carson, or DDT, or the importance of insects for a healthy environment, but I did know that the only time I would hear a Blue Jay was at my grandma and grandpa Michniak’s home.

My maternal grandparents lived in Taylor, a short 20-minute drive up “Bloody Telegraph” Road. Compared to Trenton, Taylor was the sticks. Houses sat on quarter-acre plots, many of the side streets were unpaved, and my grandfather had two hunting beagles named Babe and Old Blue. (I’m not making this up.) During summer vacation, I would often spend weeks on end at my grandparents’, playing baseball with my cousins, riding our bikes through the curbless streets, and catching frogs in the nearby creek (pronounced “crik”).

And there were birds. Mostly robins and grackles and starlings and house sparrows. But the bird that I will associate forever with my grandparents’ home was the Blue Jay. Every morning began with the shriek of a Blue Jay, wafting in through the gossamer curtains that waved softly in the summer morning breeze. To be accurate, the Blue Jay’s call does not waft anywhere, ever. It’s loud and insistent. It jumps you unexpectedly and whacks you up the side of the head. But for this pre-adolescent boy sleeping at his grandparents’ home, the Blue Jay’s call woke me to a feeling of Christmas-morning-like quiet excitement. There would be no fighting over bathroom time with my brother and sister. Grandma would have eggs, or waffles, with real butter, not margarine. There would even be coffee, with pet milk and a couple spoons of sugar. And cousins waiting with baseball bats and fishing nets. The Blue Jay’s morning call was all of that.

Of course, any self-respecting Blue Jay would cringe at being associated with the notion of quiet excitement. In response, a Blue Jay might growl: “Waffles, sweet coffee, quiet excitement? Give me a break, kid. Get out of bed and put some peanuts in this empty bird feeder. Now!”… as it shoves away all the smaller birds gathered at said feeder. Talk about a bird with attitude. The Blue Jay is the raucous shriek in a cold winter forest, pestering a snoozing Barred Owl. It’s the domineering backyard visitor, who'll make off with every peanut or sunflower seed you place within its reach. Wherever it goes, the Blue Jay acts like it owns the place. Its every feather, every sound, every mannerism cries out: I’m in charge here. You will pay attention to me.

And we do. How can we not? Even the typical person who doesn't take much note of birds can't help but notice a Blue Jay. Along with robin and cardinal and pigeon and house sparrow, Blue Jay is a bird that can be named by even the slickest of city slickers.

Grandpa called them Jay Birds. He taught me that the sound of a squeaking gate coming from high in the cherry tree was a Jay Bird. That other strange sound, like a gull imitating a crow that’s imitating a Red-shouldered Hawk? That’s a Jay Bird, pretending to be more than he is. I know now that Blue Jays often imitate the Red-Shouldered Hawk. But at that time, of course, I did not even know who was doing the imitating, let alone what it was they were imitating.

Last week I was hiking in a park in southwest Michigan and I heard the distant call of a Blue Jay. Once again that sound did its magic. The rusty leaves still clinging to the nearby beech tree became curtains gently swaying. I heard Babe and Old Blue howling for their breakfast. I smelled waffles and coffee. I heard my cousins shouting from outside, “Dan, let’s go!” I even recalled the elm tree in Trenton, and wondered if it is still standing. I thought of my brother and sister, sitting in its branches. Maybe a Jay Bird, too? And I was taken unawares by feelings of quiet excitement.

To the squawking Michigan Blue Jay who would probably take offense at my waxing nostalgic at the sound of its voice, I have only this to say: Get over it, already.

Dan's Feathursday Feature is a regular contribution to the COS blog featuring the thoughts, insights and photography of Chicago birder, Dan Lory on birds of the Chicago region.