Visitation From A BirdCam Blue Jay

In my last post, I extolled the virtues of our BirdCam, a delightful contraption that, this spring, provided a fun little window into the lives of our backyard buntings, orioles, and other winged neighbors. Alas, summer has since arrived, migrants have moved north and upslope, and now BirdCam feeds us a dull diet of House Finches and House Sparrows. But! Last week, it did deliver us this:

Yep, that’s a Blue Jay — an iconic eastern bird, flitting through the mountains of central Colorado. It isn’t the first we’ve seen; we’ve had “Blue Jay” on our whiteboard of bird observations since last spring. Not that all of my friends believe it: I’ve had more than one person question the sighting, as though we can’t tell a Blue Jay from a Scrub Jay from a Steller’s from a Pinyon. But now we have definitive proof! (This, by the way, gets at the affirmative argument for capitalizing common bird names: There’s a difference between a blue jay — i.e., a jay that is blue — and a true Blue Jay.)

In truth, I understand my friends’ skepticism — for, when you look at a map of Blue Jay range, you see this, with our town marked in red:

It appears we’re just beyond the edge of known Blue Jay range. Go West, young corvid! Granted, that historic map obviously isn’t the be-all end-all representation of the species’ range; they’ve been steadily creeping west for years, likely following human subsidies (our trash, our feeders, and the rest of our civilizational detritus). When you examine eBird, a much more current depiction of their distribution, you get the following, with our locale circled — not a wealth of sightings, but that little purple cell means we’re aren’t the first to spot ’em:

So, no, I’m not about to write (yet another!) scientific paper documenting the expanded range of a synanthropic not-entirely-native species. But I still think this is a fun and enlightening data point — and yet another reason that our BirdCam will remain active all summer long, even if it means sorting through a monotonous scroll of House Sparrow vids.