Cyanocitta cristata
Order Passeriformes
Family Corvidae
Adult.— Upper parts grayish-blue; head furnished with a crest, which is often, however, depressed; wings and tail bright blue, with narrow black bars and broad white spots; throat gray; collar about breast and neck black; lower belly white.
Nest, placed in thick evergreen from five to twenty feet up.
Eggs, greenish, spotted with brown.
The Blue Jay is a common permanent resident of New England and New York, but is most numerous in the autumn. It inhabits woodland of any sort, feeding in fall and winter on grain, acorns, and nuts; in spring and summer it lives largely on insects, but too often robs the nests of other birds of eggs or young. Though a noisy bird at times, a pair can be so silent about the nesting site that the eggs will perhaps be laid before their presence is suspected. Their bright contrast, too, of blue and white, is not nearly so conspicuous in leafy shade as one might expect. Jays have a habit of hopping upward from one branch to the next till they reach the top of a tree. When flying through open spaces, they keep at almost an exact level, and may by this peculiarity of flight be recognized at some distance. Jays are very vigilant and give notice by their screams of the presence of an intruder; hawks and owls are frequently pursued by a noisy mob.
Their notes vary greatly; the commonest are the well known strident djay djay, a higher and more prolonged tee-ar tee-ar, which exactly simulates the scream of the Red-shouldered Hawk, a resonant, trumpet-like teerr and a too-wheedle too-wheedle, which suggests the creaking of a wheelbarrow. When uttering these sounds from a perch, Jays open the wings, and bend the head back and forth, like crows when cawing. They have also, in spring, low, sweet crooning notes. Many good observers believe that the Jay imitates the cries of various hawks, such as the Broad-winged and the Sparrow Hawk [American Kestrel]. The fact remains that even where the Red-shouldered Hawk is uncommon, the Jay frequently uses a note like his scream, so that it may be a part of his original repertoire, and not an imitation.
Hoffmann – A Guide to the Birds of New England and Eastern New York (1904)