MY FRIEND THE JAY

Every man who comes into the world has need of friends.” What Ursa Major thus profoundly observes of mankind, from China to Peru, might be applied with special force to the blue jay, at least to those jays that come into the world. Of the rest “deponent saith not.” For by common consent the blue jay is a rascal, nay even a villain; and to deepen his turpitude to an infinity of wickedness, I have heard one uncherished female with a disposition slightly acid liken him to a Man. Indeed, were some of his detractors to be believed, there is scarcely a crime in the whole avian calendar that has not been meditated upon and hatched in his nest.

It is true that there are people of such impinging personality that merely mild dislike with respect to them seems impossible. The reactions they produce are violent. Their admirers, when they have any, pursue their loyalty to an O Altitudo! their enemies (and such are usually legion) make of their names a hissing, and spit them out of the mouth. To particularize, I might refer to a gentleman who was vigorously active in the political unpleasantness of 1912. His friends saw in him a Godefroy, come to lead the politically pure against the hordes of the standpat infidels; his enemies, when they had wiped the froth from their lips, turned the vocabulary of prayer to evil uses, and accused him of being in league with the devil.

But these are merely individuals. The cases in which an indictment is drawn up against a whole people are comparatively rare,—the Goths, perhaps, the Turks, and the bloodthirsty Belgians, to bring it down to modern times, will serve as examples. Just such an inclusive indictment is brought against the jay. “I fear,” says one amiable and authoritative writer on bird life, “that the blue jay is a reprobate”; and in this opinion most authorities concur. Are there not, then, three righteous jays in all Israel? No, say his judges. Peradventure one? “Only in the museums of natural history,” they inexorably answer. All living jays are impudent, profane, mischievous, cannibalistic, “the hul cussed tribe of ’em,” as one exasperated gardener wrathfully declared to me.

Dear, dear! This is a terrible situation. Like Fuzzy Wuzzy, the poor blue jay “‘asn’t got no papers of his own.” Nor can he follow the example of those benevolent corporations whose judicious investments in advertising space temper the unshorn lamb to receive the shears in a docile mood, and at the same time protect them from too close scrutiny by the newspapers. He must bear the slings and air-guns of outrageous boyhood with scarcely a voice raised in his behalf. It seems hardly fair.

It is true that the jay is not delicate in his appetite. He cannot, like the ethereal maiden whom Burton mentions, subsist for months on the smell of a rose. I knew one old gentleman, to be sure, who secured a brief respite from care, and achieved a state of mild hilarity, by applying his nose to the mouth of a whiskey jug. But the jay enjoys not these olfactive refections. He needs more substantial food. He is omnivorous; and out of that important characteristic springs his most reprehensible trait: he eats little birds.

One morning last summer I got up rather earlier than usual to transplant some asters before the sun should come out hot. It was a calm, breezeless morning, with scarcely a sound to disturb the cool quietude, except the song of a robin on the top of the old maple. Heaven be praised! we have no trolley cars in our village, and no factories. Suddenly there broke out in the alley, the wildest commotion imaginable. It sounded as though the sparrows from five counties were there, and had eaten of the insane root. The air was filled with shrill cries, chirps, and excited chatterings. I rushed to the fence, my fingers all mud, and looked over. In the midst of a flock of sparrows forty or more in number, all hopping about distractedly but none daring to attack him, stood a big blue jay with his crest militantly erect. From time to time he pecked at something, but what that something was, like Peterkin, I could not well make out. At every stroke of his strong black beak the cries of the sparrows shrilled louder; whenever he paused and looked around in his truculent contempt, their frenzied crescendos somewhat abated.

Curious, I drew nearer and discovered that the object of his unpleasant attention was a young sparrow, a mere fledgeling, scarcely old enough to be out of the nest. He was murderously pecking it in the eye. The wee helpless thing fluttered weakly in its agony and cheeped piteously. I grabbed up an empty fruit jar that had protected a rose cutting from the blasts of winter, and hurled it at the jay. He flew screaming to a sour cherry tree a short distance away, from which safe vantage point he cursed me with every oath and revilement in his scandalous vocabulary. The little sparrow I put out of its misery.

As I went back to my asters, I could not help reflecting on the scene I had witnessed. I seemed to see in it a small counterpart of what had happened in Europe. Here was little Servia in the person of this young sparrow—something of a nuisance, perhaps, yet comparatively defenseless. And here in the arrogant, domineering jay, relentless and powerful, was Austria. A similitude might likewise be made out for Belgium and Germany. And where, I wondered, did my own country come in? With almost sinister significance a sleek bronze grackle, plump and round, his eyes standing out with fatness, emerged leisurely from among the currant bushes and gobbled up a worm. I had been vaguely aware of his presence from the first, and now as I noted his well-fed complacency, and remembered that he had been foraging around utterly oblivious of the little tragedy being enacted in the alley, I lost my patience and let fly a good-sized clod.

But jays are jays, and it were unfair to demand from them a standard of conduct that even human beings, with all their centuries of moral education, find it hard to apply. As a matter of fact the only jay I ever caught red-beaked at such murderous work was the one in the alley, and my field of observation has extended clear from the coast of Maine part way to the Rocky Mountains. Yet if a man from Mars were to pick up a bundle of newspapers, and could make out the strange little characters imprinted thereon, he would probably infer that murder was a trade common enough among human beings, particularly to-day. He would see it as a highly organized and severely technical activity carried on by whole nations under the direction of their respective governments. It must be said, however, that although the sensitive nerve of national honor seems oftenest to reside in the national belly, nations rarely murder with the object of eating their victims. And those jays that murder are censurable chiefly in this: they have learned so little from humanity’s civilized forbearance.

To tell the truth, the jay is not the fiercely courageous and militantly aggressive biped his harsh cries and erected crest might lead one to suppose. His aspect is doubtless frightful to some small birds, but most of them recognize in him much of the Pistolian braggart. I have seen a house-wren, about the size of a large colored gentleman’s thumb, drive him away from her vine-shaded dwelling. Robins quickly put him to flight, and so, too, do catbirds and cardinals. Even the mourning dove (gentlest of birds) does not fear to measure her mild weapons with his; and one of the most amusing spectacles I ever witnessed was the comical bluff of a dove who puffed out her breast, fierce as a lamb, and literally pushed the swash-buckling blue jay clean off the feed board.

That the jay does not always exercise the discretion of which the timid proverb speaks, the crown of my head can very well testify. One pleasant afternoon, while I was breathlessly pursuing the phantom of an idea through the syntactical mazes of a freshman theme, I became aware of the sharp screaming of a pair of jays directly beneath my open window. I glanced out and saw (item) one baby jay squatting all hunched up on the close-cut lawn in the sunlight; (item) one long, lithe, black cat in the shadow of the syringa bush, blinking its greedy yellow eyes and moving its tail with a gentle, snaky, anticipatory motion; and (item) two frantic parent jays darting viciously at the black sphinx, and shrieking like a couple of suffragettes in the hands of a pair of miserable London bobbies. I watched the little drama until I saw the cat quivering for the spring; whereupon, forsaking the rôle of spectator, I threw my bottle of red ink and drove the dark marauder from the field. Surely never was preceptorial red ink put to more humane uses.

As I turned back to my themes, it occurred to me that here was the very opportunity I had been looking for. My favorite hobby is taking bird pictures, and I had long desired a picture of a young jay. Most fledgelings bear a ludicrous likeness to very old men. They wear an expression of solemn and pessimistic wisdom such as comes only to those who have looked long on the vanities of mankind. And it has always seemed to me that the infant jay bears a weird resemblance to England’s Grand Old Man, Mr. Gladstone, after he had passed the prime of old age. Out of regard, then, for the great Liberal minister, and also because I am no rifler of nests, I seized my old black hat and a camera, and dashed downstairs. My plan was to drop the hat over the unsuspecting fledgeling so that I could pick him up without any fuss, and pose him on the grape-vine behind the house. But the young rascal, divining my intention, hopped away, and kept with exasperating nicety just out of reach. Finally, by dint of much scrambling along on my knees, taking care to preserve as innocent an expression as I could, I managed to clap the hat over him. But as I took him out from the sudden gloom, he gave one terrified shriek, and the next instant BING! something sharp, something penetrating, something entirely unexpected, struck me on the head. It was the marvellously efficient beak of Mr. Jay.

I did not try to reason with him or placate him in wheedling tones. The ambient air was too full of a shrapnel burst of screaming, darting, pecking, whirling, shrieking blue jay. His shrill and angry cries, moreover, called to his aid three other jays, and such a stream of feathered Billingsgate followed as, I felt sure, must fix the eyes of all the neighborhood upon me. And so I retreated to the house, endeavoring in my gait to preserve that dignity of bearing which is generally supposed to be the fruit of an academic life. But the jay, with the uncomfortable persistence of a bee or a small heel-snapping terrier, pursued me to the very door, and might have chased me upstairs had it not been for the screen. After that I decided never again to attempt kidnapping a jay without the protection of a policeman’s helmet.

But the fierce detractors of the blue jay will doubtless scoff at this as evidence of a sometimes resolute daring. I do not resent the implied aspersion of my own courage; I am content to leave that to the judgment of my readers. There is, however, one bit of commendation to which even they must “assent with civil ear,” as a freshman of mine put it. The blue jay is almost humanly intelligent. Mind, I do not argue that he can, offhand, give you the distinction between free verse and a page from a real poet’s note-book, or that he can explain precisely why certain matters are deleted by the British censors. But with the intrepidity of a new Congressman delivering a speech in the Record, I dare assert, “without fear of successful contradiction,” that the blue jay is among the most intelligent of feathered bipeds.

Not long ago, during a particularly sharp attack of bitter weather, with frosty bayonets in the air but no snow on the ground, I was holding a conference in the English office with one of my students, a girl whose sweet deep eyes gave no flicker of understanding as I tried to make clear to her the difference between a sentence and a clause. To conceal my sorrow I stepped to the window and gazed off through the grayish-blue beeches with their dead brown leaves shivering in the keen air, trying, meanwhile, to recall what principle of pedagogic efficiency I had failed to employ. Presently a blue jay with something white in its beak alighted upon the twisted limb of a maple not a rod from the window, and began a close inspection of the rough bark. He found what he was looking for, a hole; and into this he thrust the white substance which he carried in his beak, suet possibly, from the feed-board below, or a bit of bread. He cocked his head on one side and eyed the little cache in a thoughtful manner. Then he dropped to the ground.

I thought that was the end, but I was mistaken. Soon he shot up to the limb, this time with a dead leaf in his beak. I watched intently and saw him carefully lay the leaf over the hole where he had hidden the suet. A gust of wind, however, blew the leaf off the limb, and sent it swirling to the ground. Quick as a hawk the jay swooped after it in an ineffectual attempt to capture it while it was still in the air. They reached the ground together. Convinced apparently that the leaf was too large, he selected another, much smaller, and carried it up to the limb. This time he did not merely lay the leaf over the hole; he had learned his lesson. Instead, he rammed the leaf into the hole on top of the suet, a really difficult job, and packed it firmly with his beak. It was safe from the other jays if not from the inquisitive redheaded woodpecker who lived only a few branches away. Now all you host of cocksure psychologists, was it instinct or reason that led the jay?

I know it has been argued that since a jay will attack a stuffed owl placed near his nest, he must be without the power of reason. The test seems hardly fair, for the ghoulish mystery of the taxidermist is known to no animal but man. Thus at the very start the jay is laid under an unreasonable handicap. Consider, too, the ingeniously cruel nature of this test; it pierces him as it were in the eye of his most sensitive instinct. Even human parents, faced by an ordeal at all comparable to this in sudden poignancy, would scarcely act in a manner calmly rational. What mother, leaving her infant slumbering in the cradle, and suddenly returning to find a brutal visaged mannikin bent over it in a posture of menace, would expend the millionth of a second in the psychologist’s reflective delay? Like the jay, she would act in such a situation from instinct alone, nor would we consider her deficient in intelligence.

But even if the jay were as stupid as an old-model political prison-warden, or an English official in Ireland, which he indubitably is not, I would still look upon him with an indulgent eye. The redbird excepted, he is the sole bit of lively color in our winter landscape. No matter how sharp the wind or deep the snow, you will find him foraging among the low bushes or uttering his cheerfully vigorous jay! jay! jay! from the airy chambers of some tall, bare maple. And if you are of that generous company who share their winter bounty with the birds, from none of your feathered charity scholars will you receive more evident tokens of full appreciation than from the maligned jay. He is as prompt to the feeding board as an impecunious college professor to the bursar’s office at the end of the first quarter. To be sure, his table manners are somewhat rude, but what he lacks in elegance he more than atones for with a certain robust beef-and-pudding gusto that I have somehow come to associate with Lord Macaulay.

It is in the spring, however, in the days of warm sunshine and clear air, when the grass begins to quicken along the walks and around the roots of the big elm-trees, when the vanguard of the crocus legions have thrust their green spear-heads up through the sere lawn, and the buds on the lilac bushes along the garden fence have begun to swell, that the jay reveals how really amiable he can be. To many who do not know him well it will come as a surprise to learn that he possesses vocal attainments far beyond the harsh cry from which he takes his name. Under the spell of love he becomes truly melodic. He will sit for ten minutes at a time in the old black cherry-tree, and beginning with a soft, prelusory, ventriloquial whistle, as though he were a musician testing his flute, he will run through a series of little musical snatches surprising in their mimetic variety. Now it will seem like a baby’s silver rattle, or like clear water gurgling over a sunny bed of pebbles; again you will hear a note or two of the robin, or a plaintive echo of the bluebird’s song, or even the beautiful sliding legato of the cardinal,—with a crack in it, perhaps.

As the head of a family the blue jay is exemplary. He is not one of those who think they perform the whole duty of husbands when they preen their gay feathers in the sunlight, or lift their voices in flattering song, while their plain little wives build the nest, hatch the eggs, and go in search of the nourishing worm. Not much! He believes that marriage is a partnership involving equal duties and responsibilities; and so, during the nesting season, you will see him busily at work, searching for the best twigs, paper, string, tendrils, and rootlets obtainable. I once saw a nest that had a piece of yellow paper sticking out of its side, with the cryptic legend—otes for wom—plainly legible on it, but I am not sure that it had any real significance. Feeding the young jays, too, he considers part of his fatherly duties, and sometimes, though not often, he even treats Mrs. Jay to a specially delicate tidbit of bug or worm. If the latter should happen to be fuzzy, he will follow his careful wife’s example and thoroughly wipe the fuzz off on the rough bark of some tree.

And he likes his bath; no monocled Englishman better. Indeed, if you really wish to enjoy a treat, set a rusty shallow pan of water on your lawn, not too near the tulip-bed or shrubbery (Cats!), and see what follows. If you have been thoughtful enough to place a stone or a piece of brick near the rim of the pan, Mr. and Mrs. Jay will step right in and enjoy a thorough wetting without much preliminary skirmishing. But little Willie Jay and his four brothers will exhibit all the delicious trepidation of childhood. While their parents are in the bath, they will be bold enough, even to running up and allowing themselves to be splashed on; but when it comes to actually entering the water, ugh! They will linger around the edge of the pan, fluttering their wings, hop across it, dip their beaks into the water, turn around, and splash the water with their tails—in short, go through all the motions of a small boy having his first “duck under” without the assuring grasp of his father’s strong hand. But once let them get in, and oh, what a joyous splashing ensues, what a ruffling of feathers, what a beating of wings, what a fan-like fluttering of the tail! Like most small boys, too, they will stay in until they are thoroughly soaked, scarcely able, in fact, to fly up to some sunny limb where they may preen themselves and dry off out of harm’s reach.

No, the jay is not an unprincipled scoundrel, not the bloodthirsty reprobate he is sometimes made out to be. He has his faults, it is true, properly censurable; but he has some very commendable virtues as well. And I am sure that if the reader will watch his career as carefully as I have, from his fledgeling childhood to his gay and dashing cavalier youth, he will agree with me that the imaginations of the blue jay’s heart are not wholly evil.