What Colour Is A Steller's Jay?

Day 147: Today's interrogative is "What?" as in "What colour is a Steller's Jay?" Hint: the correct answer is NOT "blue."

We generally accept that colour is due to pigments, but many critters have ways of fooling us. The birds we perceive as blue (Bluebird, Blue Jay, Steller's Jay, Indigo Bunting and others) have no blue pigment in their feathers. They are, as birders often call confusing sparrows, LBJs..."little brown jobs," actually either brown or black. The illusion of colour is brought to us by the physics governing prisms and the reflection/refraction of light. It is the cellular structure of keratin in feathers which causes them to appear blue, but in fact, there are no 'natural blues' in the bird world, not a single one. That's the scientific truth.