When I turned it over, with a stick, of course, I saw that it was a dead Blue Jay. When I saw that it was quite clean, I positioned it to get this photo of all its splendid colorful feathers.
When I went to look up the Latin name for it I discovered that there are other Jays, as well: the Brown, Gray, Green and Scrub Jays. How interesting to find this out at this age!! None of them look alike. I thought maybe they would all look the same with different coloring. Wrong - the Brown Jay, pigeon-sized, is in Southern Texas and is sooty brown with a white underbelly. The Gray Jay, robin-sized, looking like a giant Chickadee, can be found in many parts of the country. The Scrub Jay, robin-sized, blue, and is found in Florida. The Green Jay, robin-sized, of Texas is very colorful, a brilliant green above with a shiny, powder-blue head and face with a black eyebrow connecting with a broad black patch from the ear to the chin and throat, with underparts pale yellow-green, and the tip of its green tail is tinged with blue.
The Blue Jay, Cyanacitta cristata, is robin-sized and can be found all over our area on any given day!! Since this astounding creature was left under my tree, I had to get it out of the cat's reach, so bundled it up after posing it for some choice shots.
These are the tail feathers,
which when spread out show that there about a dozen of them, not just the few that can been seen initially.
The downy feathers covering the body are of such a beautiful shade of dusky blue.
And the wings, oh the wings, look at all the varying hues of blue. All this from nature! How utterly Divine!!
Now that you have had this up close and personal look at a Blue Jay, remember its outstanding beauty the next time you hear that annoying cawing at an ungodly early morning hour next year!!!
2 comments:
Poor, lovely bird!
Next time you ought to use gloves to handle it, just to be safe. Jays are one of the possible carriers of west Nile Virus. If you don't know what killed this bird, I think there is some local agency that would like to have it, so that they can test for the virus.
Alternatively, if you know what killed it (such as an unfortunate collision with a window - we had some birds die that way last year) and if you are up for some icky work, you can clean the skull to keep.
(What I do with skulls is first leave them under a flower pot to decompose, and then I boil what's left.)
There, now you know the depths of my quirkyness!
Thanks for the information, Michelle. Isn't it sad that we have to worry about such things as West Nile Virus, etc. There was a time when it was much easier to just live more simply without all those external worries.
I passed the bird on to someone who will be burying it and then using the skeleton for teaching purposes.
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