Blue jays use prank calls to drive off competition

Why would a red-tailed hawk, a large raptor of open country, hang around a St. Paul neighborhood, screaming its distinctive "screeahhh" for days on end? After two weeks of this, Jon Gorder trained binoculars on his backyard trees to find the hawk and came up with a very different bird — a blue jay.

He reported the sighting to a local birding listserv and asked whether this kind of behavior is common. Replies came in quickly, with responders agreeing that blue jays imitate several kinds of raptors.

When she hears a hawk, Pamela Freeman has learned not to be too quick to identify it by sound alone. "I always look before assuming I know who's making the calls, after being duped by jays a number of times," says the Oak Grove birdwatcher.

Jays making raptor sounds is pretty common, says Linda Whyte, a St. Paul birdwatcher who's heard them imitate red-tailed and Cooper's hawks. Paul Worwa in Chanhassen and Steve Weston in Eagan both hear jays mimicking red-shouldered hawks.

They're copycats

Blue jays are natural mimics and can learn the sounds made by other birds. I've often heard a Cooper's hawk's "kek-kek-kek" in my backyard, causing birds to flee from the feeders, followed by a blue jay flying in to feed alone. Many others report similar behavior in their backyards. We often assume that the blue jays are using hawk sounds to scare off smaller birds and snatch up peanuts and seeds without competition.

But is that really what these big-brained birds are up to? Few people know more about blue jays than Duluth naturalist Laura Erickson, so I asked her about it.

Her reading tells her that jays imitate hawks near feeders to alarm other birds. (She also believes that they use hawk calls in springtime to frighten parent birds away from nests, allowing blue jays to raid them.)

"Although blue jays are extremely intelligent, they're not all that aggressive," says Erickson, "so they're often chased away from feeders by more aggressive songbirds. I've seen cardinals, rose-breasted grosbeaks, grackles and even white-throated sparrows charging jays and winning the encounter. By outsmarting them, the jays get at least a few bites before they get chased off."

Fooling around or deadly serious?

I want to be careful not to make a correlation where none might exist, because there's been very little study of blue jay mimicry. And in fact, there are reports of solitary blue jays in the woods making hawk calls with no other birds around, suggesting that such sounds merely could be part of the bird's wide repertoire.

But is it possible that blue jays might sometimes imitate hawk calls in order to convey to other jays that a raptor predator is around? Birdwatcher Whyte thinks so, and cites a recent example:

"I heard several jays giving a combination of both warning calls and Cooper's hawks sounds recently," she said. "It seemed as though they were specifying the nature of imminent danger from the two hawks nearby."

I tend to agree that blue jays know what they're doing when they give raptor calls around feeders. And there's no denying that they're one of the noisiest birds in the backyard.

But as Freeman notes, "They're often maligned, but they are really interesting birds. They often work in groups under my feeders, where some go about feeding while one or two others keep watch before switching roles."

Maybe more of us would become blue jay fans if we had an experience like longtime Minnetonka birdwatcher and writer Don Grussing:

"When they do sing, which I have only heard once, it is soft, musical and beautiful — such a wonderful surprise."

St. Paul resident Val Cunningham, who volunteers with the St. Paul Audubon Society and writes about nature for local, regional and national newspapers and magazines, can be reached at valwrites@comcast.net.