Little Brown Jobs

Day 24: In the parlance of birding, you may hear the terms "LBJ" and "LGB" which respectively represent those hard-to-distinguish  "Little Brown Jobs" and "Little Grey Birds." While not exactly little, Steller's Jays are nonetheless "brown jobs" whose intricate feather structure refracts and reflects light in a manner humans perceive as blue. Blue pigmentation does not exist in birds. Bluebirds, peacocks, lazuli buntings...all LBJs. That said, one might wonder how a "blue" bird is seen by other birds which, as I'm sure you are aware, see a wider spectrum than our own eyes. Does a Steller's Jay appear to its companions as brown, blue, or perhaps shimmering with iridescence? We don't know. We humans have a saying about walking a mile in the other person's shoes in order to gain their perspective, yet in many cases, that is a goal as unattainable as being able to see the world through a bird's eyes, literally or figuratively. Nor can we think like a bird, or a dog or a cat or an elephant for that matter, because we are constricted in our concept of thought being verbal. That is not to say that non-verbal thought is any less rich than one which depends on words, and in fact may be richer by virtue of being formed of experiences and sensations. In other words, humans are not so far up the evolutionary ladder as they like to imagine themselves to be. Although I know empirically that a Steller's Jay is brown, I cannot convince my eyes that it is anything but blue. For me at least, that's a humbling thought.