Steller’s Jays are a familiar sight here in the redwoods of Northern California. These blue-and-black crested corvids are hard to miss. They seem to wreak havoc wherever they go, bouncing between trees in small groups and loudly dominating the feeders at your deck. Known equally well for their harsh vocalizations, that cacophonous band of jays in your yard might be mobbing a potential predator – or maybe they’re just hollering about their day.
Today, we walked outside and our ears perked at a faint sound emanating from the California Bay across the street. We recognized this vocalization as a normally-hard-to-miss Steller’s Jay making one of its quieter and less common sounds while hunkered down in foliage. Sometimes the bird is buried so deep we can’t locate it, but today there it was!
The jay was hunched over with a flattened crest making a series of quiet warbles, gurgles, buzzes, and mumbles. Its throat visibly vibrated with each sound, yet its bill barely ever opened. This is often referred to as a “whisper song,” the purpose of which is not well understood. According to Cornell Lab’s Birds of North America reference database, this less frequent vocalization is made in a variety of contexts including courtship, foraging, adults singing to juveniles, and spontaneous solo noise-making.**
Take a listen to today’s bird:
Here are some closer views mid-performance:
At one point, our songster stopped serenading to mimic a Red-shouldered Hawk. Pretty convincing, huh?
After several minutes, our talkative jay abruptly flew to a nearby exposed power line and gave its customary “wek” call complete with a raised crest:
Unlike bird topography, where every feather has a precise name and definition, bird sounds do not yet have a fully developed and agreed-upon terminology. At times, the purposes of various vocalizations aren’t even well understood. What was today’s Steller’s Jay communicating? Was there a fellow jay nearby we didn’t notice? Was it practicing its repertoire? Or was it simply for fun?
Observing and recording bird calls and songs is an aspect of birding we particularly enjoy. Garnering the ability to distinguish birds based on vocalizations is certainly rewarding – add in the extra layer of wonder as to what they’re communicating with each different sound, and we’ve got an endless puzzle to explore each time we step outside.
Keep your eye (and ear!) out for more audio-based blog posts to come!
** Walker, L. E., P. Pyle, M. A. Patten, E. Greene, W. Davison, and V. R. Muehter (2016). Steller’s Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri), version 2.0. In The Birds of North America (P. G. Rodewald, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA.
right when i got to the bottom of the post i heard the wek wek wek outside my window.
Hahah, we paid that guy 5 peanuts to do that. It’s the new immersive blog experience.
I have a happy little guy that comes to my porch every day to get all cozy and puff up like a little cotton ball and sings to me while I work just inside the door.
Awww, what joy he must bring you! 🙂
Lucky to find your story on Stellar jay warbling. Heard on yesterday deep inside an evergreen scrub and thought catbird, but that would be rare here in the PNW. Took me 10 minutes to see the bird. Finally saw it picking through miss, then resumed its mimicry. Thought a myna escaped or the physics of sound played games. So subdued. For decades in New Mexico, I nevenever heard this phenomenon. Stellar is raucous, never seen hiding quietly in a shrub. In its preferred habitat there are no such dense shrubs. I wonder if this vocalization might occur during the dawn chorus. Been there but never heard this. Perhaps a secure perch in a super dense shrub allows Stellars to express its corvid connection. On another note, this bird is people shy in NM, but not here even outside of urban settings. There, acts outraged at people or flies away. Critical distance much different. Birds have culture as per ethological studies. I’m getting to know a different Stellars jay set of behaviors here, how they can think, sound, and attend to mix flocks. So curious that yard birds at near sea level with huge climate differences are similar to Santa Fe piñon juniper with some exotic shrub components in the near foothills suburbs.
Wow, thanks for sharing your observations, John. We too were so surprised the first time we heard the quiet Steller’s Jay warbles, and it also took us a long time to locate the source of the sound!!! 🙂 It’s so fun thinking about birds having their own culture and sets of behaviors depending on location.