Return to Blue Jay Way

When we first moved in to this house 13 years ago, blue jays were the most prominent wildlife to be seen or heard from October until April. They flew back and forth across the driveway. So many came and went from the giant blue spruce near the house that we started calling the spruce “the bird condo.”

The jays argued with each other, scolding each other from branches and on the ground.

I had a passing thought of getting one of those street signs, and have it made up to say Blue Jay Way. In those first few years there seemed no better way to describe this little patch of Vermont.

Within a year or two I started noticing the crows. Again, especially in winter. As sunset approached I would see them flying over the house. One, two, three, seven. It was impossible to count them all – and impossible to see where they were going.

When I learned about crows roosting together in big numbers during the winter, it seemed obvious to me that a roost was nearby. I thought it would be fun to follow the crows one night and find out where they roosted, but I had a baby to care for, and wherever they were going, it was out of sight from the house.

Crows are relatives to blue jays. They are both in the bird family Corvidae (along with ravens and magpies, but the ravens are a story for another day). Now with blue jays and crows around the place all the time, the street sign would be better off reading "Corvidae Way."

Then one fall about six years ago things got very quiet. The blue jays were gone. Just suddenly, and totally gone. They didn’t bicker on the driveway. They didn’t come and go from the bird condo.

There were fewer crows too. And by the next year there were noticeably much fewer crows as well.

Back then West Nile Virus was very much in the news. I knew that crows were sensitive to West Nile, and that blue jays were too.

But I didn’t dare think that it was West Nile that had wiped out the blue jays and the crows. The disappearance of blue jays and crows could have been a local phenomenon, just on our property. And anyway, Vermont had had only one human case of West Nile virus diagnosed. It seemed unlikely that the virus was the cause.

Last year I noticed a few blue jays around. Now this year, they are everywhere. It is just like the old days. The call out in the middle of the day, getting me away from my desk and to the window to see if they are mobbing a hawk or an owl.

The crows are back too. Not in as many numbers as they once were, but I’ll give them another year.

Recently, I spoke to someone from the Ascutney Mountain Audubon Society. He said that the numbers of blue jays and crows in the area’s Christmas Bird Counts had dropped in the last five years. But he too thought the blue jays were back this year. He didn’t hesitate to say he thought it was West Nile that did them in, and that it was some adaptation among these blue jays and crows to West Nile that had allowed them to come back.

Sounds of the Season

The leaves went crunch. Crunch. Crunch. It sounded like something big and heavy walking through the woods. But the late autumn woods are deceptive. What sounds like something huge walking ponderously along often turns out to be the cautious bound, pause, bound, pause of a squirrel.

I peered in to the woods, but saw nothing.

A red squirrel trilled near the sound of the footsteps. The trill is its way of saying, “My place! Stay out!” So perhaps it was another squirrel, but perhaps not. Red squirrels are bold, and seem to consider everything, big and small, a threat. There was once a red squirrel in our backyard who trilled at me every time I went out the back door.

What I didn’t hear was the persistent chip chip of the chipmunks that I often hear this time of year. The chip is a warning call, hurrying young chipmunks away from occupied territory. But no chipmunk could set up a home near that aggressive red squirrel.

The crunching stopped for a moment, then began again.

A blue jay scolded in a screeching jay-jay on the other side of the footsteps. Jay-jay, it scolded again. Jay-jay! Something was making it mad.

Was it me, or the thing in the woods? I could see nothing, but then I’ve watched a moose walk in to the woods at that very spot, and disappear from my view after taking a few steps.

I never solved this mystery. The sound of my daughter calling out the window to me ended my search for the footstep maker. But it was a nice reminder that even this sparse season has its own sounds, and its own stories to tell through them.