A blue jay and a green jay mated, researchers say. Their offspring is a scientific marvel
It took a couple tries to catch the suspected blue jay-green jay hybrid. Corvidsorvids — birds of a group that includes jays, crows and ravens — are notoriously clever.
The researchers tagged the mystery bird and drew blood for genetic sampling. They noted that their study subject displayed distinct traits of both blue and green jays — which aren’t that closely related and split off from a common ancestor around 7 million years ago.
The bird had blue feathers on its back and tail and white spots on its wings, similar to a blue jay. But it lacked a blue jay’s spiky crown and had a spot over its eye that is one telltale sign of a green jay. The outlier followed a flock of blue jays and made similar calls. But it also produced the clicks and rattling vocalizations of a green jay.
Upon returning to the lab, Keitt and Stokes completed a series of gene analyses, comparing the DNA they’d collected with that of a blue jay, a green jay and other jay species, and determined the mystery bird was the offspring of a male blue jay and a female green jay.
One other known example of a blue jay–green jay hybrid was born in captivity in the 1960s, when the two species’ natural breeding grounds would have been separated by some 200 kilometers (120 miles). The specimen is preserved in a museum collection in Texas and looks strikingly similar to the wild bird the researchers identified.
A blue jay–green jay pairing is a ‘biologicalcurveball’Gavin M. Leighton, an associate professor of biology at Buffalo State University in Western New York who has researched trends in hybridization among wild birds and was not involved in the study, was a little surprised by the pairing. Scientists, he said, tend to assume that hybridization arises from a case of mistaken identity — two birds that don’t realize they are mating with a member of a different species. Lots of hybrids among other types of birds exist, but many are more closely related than these jays.
A map shows where the green jay and blue jay ranges overlap in Texas, as reported from 2000 to 2023 in the eBird app. - Brian Stokes/University of Texas
To Leighton, the odd pairing is something of a “biological curveball.”
“Both of these jay species form long-term social bonds with a mate,” he explained. “We would expect them to be pretty choosy about who they form these pair bonds with.” What’s more, corvidsorvids are extremely smart, and blue jays and green jays look quite different from one another. They should have no problem telling themselves apart.
A blue jay and a green jay mated, researchers say. Their offspring is a scientific marvel
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