From my chair by the fire, where I sit reading, they call to me.  Look up—they say.  Take your nose out of that book and come to the window. It is the nasally call of a corvid, but higher and softer than the call of the ravens and crows that sometimes wake me in the morning, and less harsh than the Stellar’s Jays who come in flocks off and on in the winter.

There, flitting around in the branches of my apple tree are a trio of blue and white birds that, until this winter, I have never seen before.  Blue Jays.   Common in the east, they are new to Montana.  The Montana Audubon newsletter says: “We can see an expansion in their range since the early 2,000’s.

It will be interesting to see what this means.  Corvids, of which Blue Jays are a member, are “scatter hoarders.” They cache seeds across a landscape and those that aren’t eaten sprout.  Here in Montana Clark’s Nutcrackers play an important role in maintaining our Ponderosa Forests.  What role might the Blue Jays play in the future? Perhaps the Cornell lab site gives us a hint: “In the eastern US Blue Jays speed forest fire recovery by increasing their caching effort after fires and selecting canopy gaps as cache sites.”  There is no doubt that western Montana could benefit from the presence of these birds in our ever more fiery summers.  

“Tracking distribution patterns of species over time is extremely critical, since changes in bird occurrence can often be one of the first signals of widespread environmental or habitat changes.” If you’ve seen Blue Jays this winter, document them at https://ebird.org/mt/home.