Skip to Navigation Skip to Content
Decorative woodsy background

Gray Jays: Birds With Attitude

TOS_grayjay_w.jpg
Illustration by Adelaide Tyrol

I have friends who live in the North Woods. Moose graze on their lawn. Loons call from the pond. And the gray jays line up on the deck railing for breakfast. They swoop in when they hear the coffeemaker rev up, knowing that my friend Pam will soon be out to feed them. If she isn’t quick enough, they start pecking at the window.

The gray jay, Perisoreus canadensis, is the Jack Russell terrier of the bird world. It’s smart, brazen, and attracted to people.

“It’s a fun bird to study,” said William Barnard, a biology professor at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, who has observed gray jays for about a quarter century, mostly at Victory Bog in the state’s Northeast Kingdom. Barnard is one of only a handful of scientists in North America who study the species. He’s banded 147 gray jays, outfitted 35 with radio tags to track them. He has discovered a lot about the bird, including how to determine gender by wing length. However, he still has many questions to answer, including why the Victory Bog jays appear to be bigger than those he’s studied elsewhere, and why they have fewer blood parasites.

The gray jay lives year round in the spruce-fir forests of Canada and the northern U.S. It’s a member of the corvid (crow) family, but even compared to its not-so-bashful blue jay and black crow cousins, this bird has a bold personality.

An omnivore if there ever was one, the gray jay has learned to associate humans with food. Barnard’s observations suggest adults teach their young to panhandle. And they learn quickly. No one knows when this started – perhaps when the first humans came across the Bering land bridge, they were met by a gray jay asking, “you want to share that mastodon meat?”

One of the bird’s many nicknames – whiskey jack – is believed to be a corruption of an Algonquin word for prankster. Trappers found the birds would follow them to pilfer their bait, and lumberjacks that they would rummage through their camps. Thus another nickname – camp robber.

Barnard’s offering of choice is English muffins. The birds recognize his truck. They come down for the muffins, but they’re wary. He’s taken blood samples from a lot of them and, like your dog at the vet, they don’t remember the experience fondly.

Gray jays have a memory like a Vegas card counter. They need it. They are “scatter- hoarders.” They mix food with super sticky saliva and tuck it into the bark of spruce trees at randomly selected spots in their territory. Gray jays create thousands of food caches, by some estimates up to 8,000 at one time, and retrieve some 80 percent of those morsels (what happens to the other 20 percent isn’t clear, though raids by other animals and spoilage surely take a toll).

The caches allow the jays to live year round in an area with brutal winters and to begin nesting early – February and March. Their young leave the nest in early May, when many migratory species are just arriving.

While gray jays hatch several young, the dominant sibling takes over and drives the others out. The top bird stays with the parents for at least a year, while the others fend for themselves. The subdominant birds “have a very high mortality rate,” noted Barnard.

Although gray jays are not common in Vermont and New Hampshire, there’s reason to think that the species is losing ground. Barnard has noticed a drop in the Victory Bog population, and wonders whether gray jays should go on the state’s endangered species list. The news from over the border is also worrying: a researcher in Ontario found fewer young were raised following a warm fall and winter. The theory: warmer temperatures interfere with the bird’s niche as a winter hoarder, resulting in more food spoilage, fewer young, and a gradual retrenchment northward.

Barnard understands that gray jays may not have much of a future in our region, but he would hate to see them go. “They’re absolutely delightful birds,” he said. He remembers watching a sharp-shinned hawk hunting a gray jay. The jay would hop out of the way, like a matador swinging his red cape, seemingly playing with the hawk. “It’s a classic example of gray jay attitude,” Barnard said.

Discussion *

May 01, 2023

I ran across a gray jay that was tagged on Mt Jackson New Hampshire, it has a black band and a silver one underneath. I have a couple of pictures if I can send it to you.

Joseph Drapeau
May 28, 2019

I’m as Canadian as it gets. Every fall we head to Quebec and fly far north into boreal forests to hunt moose. We are dropped off and left with only what we brought to survive. Whiskey jack/ grey jay/ Canada bird. Whatever you will call it is the most impressive creature in my books. I like to think every time I reach that area it is always the same whiskey jack that Greets me. Although most people say they’re small, when you’re that far north they are much larger than a blue jay! His trickery. His thievery is very much true as legend speaks. Also noted he will be a very good companion in the vast forests up here. They alert you to movement. Predators. And possible weather. I enjoy his surprises while fluttering on your shoulder out of nowhere and reward him with bits of my sandwich I packed that day. When camp is set up the first day I will agree!!!  As you walk miles out of the bush they flutter ahead of you leading ultimately to their goal of the spoils of free camp food and I also have pictures of canucks who had too many beers only to have a whiskey jack on either shoulder perched to clean up the mess!

John
Feb 21, 2019

Have had a single grey jay at our feeders for 3 days now - he stays all day just watching the other birds but not eating. I have never seen one here before so had trouble identifying - he seems larger then he should be!

Cynthia HamblinPerry
Feb 05, 2019

We have a newly-cleared property and just figured out who these guys were. Ours are large, which is why it took me a few tries to identify them. I was overestimating their size on the bird ID. sites. They are bold and seem to look you right in the eye.

Corey
Oct 17, 2016

Just came across this article. We have been “backyard” birders for the past 44 years and had observed gray jays around our camp in n.central Maine for many years.However, during the past several years we have observed these intriguing birds while snowshoeing in the NEK, specifically in the Wenlock /Ferdinand area of Vt….having now retired we seem to be spending more time exploring this area and in the past 2 years have noticed an increase in numbers of gray jays each time we are in Ferdinand..in earlier years it appeared that we would observe 2 or 3 gray jays ..they were quite timid,however,the past 3 to7 months we have noticed that they were becoming more inquisitive,and during the past month, from Sept -now mid October,we have had the experience of feeding the gray jays out of our hands..as they cache and return…weekend of 10/07 -10/10 there were 3 following us on the Moose Bog Trail..feeding as we stopped along the way…and the weekend of 10/14 -10/16 we had the experience of 8 gray jays “finding” us at the observation deck off the moose bog trail..once again voraciously competing for granola bars, raisins, cranberries!..what an amazing event for us…stayed over 1 hour as we were enthralled by these birds of the boreal forest.

Sherry Marshall

Leave a reply

To ensure a respectful dialogue, please refrain from posting content that is unlawful, harassing, discriminatory, libelous, obscene, or inflammatory. Northern Woodlands assumes no responsibility or liability arising from forum postings and reserves the right to edit all postings. Thanks for joining the discussion.