Snow Jays

Day 131: Steller's Jay is absolutely stellar when ornamenting a snow-covered branch! They are also a reliable visitor to my feeders, and are here year-'round. That said, they are not the only jays who come calling. Occasionally, a few Grey Jays drift down from the upper elevations during the winter, and for the last couple of years, a Scrub Jay has shown up during the summer months. All members of the family of corvids, they may not be quite as smart as crows and ravens, but they're still some of the sharpest crayons in the box...in this case, one marked "sapphire blue." The colour is a trick of physics (refraction of light from the cellular structure of keratin in their feathers). This bird is actually just one more LBJ, the "little brown job" of birder parlance.

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.