Scrub Jay? Scrub-Jay? Scrub-Jays?

Of all the taxonomic tangles we’ve blundered into in the last 20 years, the necklaced jays of the genus Aphelocoma are among the most impenetrable. Back when I started birding, it was relatively easy: we had only The Scrub Jay, a bright blue bird with an oddly disjunct range in the mountain west, California, and Florida. Now, of course, there are three, all proudly and prominently bearing their hyphens: the Florida Scrub-Jay, the Island Scrub-Jay, and the Western Scrub-Jay.

A fine Western Scrub-Jay was the first bird to welcome us at Catalina State Park this morning. Unlike the bright birds to our west and north, the scrub-jays here in southeast Arizona are quite dull, the markings of the head and breast relatively obscure and the blue on most individuals rather grayish; inconveniently, they are, of all the scrub-jays, the most similar to Mexican Jay, and it can take some time (or at least, it took me some time) to get a good sense of the obvious structural characters that distinguish the two. Western Scrub-Jays are longer-tailed, shorter-winged, and overall more slender than the sturdy, somewhat crow-like Mexicans; a mark that I find very useful is the fact that scrub-jays tend to flip their tails in flight, while Mexicans keep their broad, short tails in line with the axis of the body.

Another behavioral difference is the shyness of our scrub-jays. Unlike the brash familiarity of Western Scrub-Jays in California, ours here are skulky, furtive creatures, given to slipping thrasher-like from bush to bush on steep slopes, easy to miss if you don’t know their snarling whines. But nobody told this bird this morning: it was hopping around on the picnic tables with an unmistakably corvid mixture of confidence and hope, confidence that no animal in the jungle would dare take it on, and hope that these sloppy humans had left a cheeto somewhere on the ground.