Researchers at UT Austin are chirping about a brand new bird.
A reported hybrid (or hybird, if you will) between Texas’ resident blue jays and green jays — nicknamed the “Grue Jay” — was sighted in San Antonio, and has since become the subject of a new study from UT Austin’s College of Natural Sciences. According to the study, the hybrid is most likely due to both species’ expanding habitats, which are in turn motivated by climate change and changing weather.
Brian Stokes, a biologist at UT Austin, led the research into this brand new bird with the help of an international grant. He spoke to Texas Standard about his work, and gave us a bird’s eye view of this new discovery. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Austin
Texas Standard: We’ve been calling this bird a “Grue Jay.” There must be some kind of scientific nomenclature for this, right?
Brain Stokes: Not really. For a bird that’s not a new species, we wouldn’t give it a formal name. I think “Grue Jay” is a fun common name for people to use.
Okay, well, let’s just go with “Grue Jay” then. What does this Grue Jay look like, and where might someone be able to actually see one?
It looks really similar to a blue jay. The majority of its body is kind of a similar color to a blue jay you would see in most of eastern Texas.
It maybe has a little less iridescence than some of the blue jays have. So if you see a blue jay standing really pretty, showing off its feathers, there’ll actually be a bit of shine to it because their feathers have a structural pigmentation inside of them that kind of refracts light.
Green jays are a more green and yellow coloration — they have a really distinct black mask, which the Grue Jay had — and that’s what made it stick out to us from the pictures we saw at first. It looked so similar to a blue jay, but it had such a distinct facial marking that looked just like how green jays in Texas look.
Where was this first Grue Jay found?
It was just northeast of San Antonio, at a private homeowner’s home. We don’t want to reveal the exact location, but the rest of the area where these two species potentially could overlap kind of falls in a line between San Antonio, down to Victoria, Texas.
So it’s a pretty wide area, but there’s not a whole lot of birding effort out of a few really skilled naturals in the area that are keeping an eye out for interesting bird interactions.
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Do these Grue Jays have a specific sound or call?
Yeah, there were a few calls that we heard from this individual that actually tipped us off that, you know, potentially, it was a hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay.
They made kind of the traditional blue jays' calls that most people in eastern Texas are going to be quite familiar with, kind of a loud squawking sound. This individual made a kind of rolling, rattling sound that is really common in green jays in South Texas, and blue jays can hypothetically make a song like that or a call like that, but it’s pretty uncommon.
It’s got a really strong, funky sound to it that sticks out a lot if you hear a blue jay making the sound.
I want to get back to something that you were just mentioning a little earlier. This bird came about through a process called hybridization. Tell us what your theory is about how this bird came about.
This bird specifically came about by a female green jay mating with a male blue jay, and the individual we found was a male hybrid.
At the time we found it, it was about a year old, and hybridization just occurs when any individuals of two different species or two different genera mate and produce an offspring.
What is the link with climate change? Can you say more about that?
Historically, these two species would not have interacted. Back in about the 1950s to 1960s, you wouldn’t have really found green jays very far north of areas like King Ranch or the lower Rio Grande Valley.
So they’ve moved up farther north, about 200 or so kilometers just outside of San Antonio, and you can find them all the way to Uvalde or Del Rio. It’s a pretty substantial expansion of their range, whereas blue jays have expanded a little bit. They would have been somewhat uncommon far west of Houston back in the ’50s or ’60s, but their populations have really increased in areas like Austin and San Antonio.
We can really clearly link those to land-use change, as people put up feeders or large deciduous trees like oaks in their yards, and these are grown in urban environments. Blue jays have really enjoyed those areas.
So the hybrid has happened in a location where historically neither of these species would have been found.
I want to ask about how this research was done in the first place. I understand that there was funding from something called the ConTex Collaborative Research Grant. What is that?
Yes, that was one of our funding groups that was a partnership between the University of Texas system and the government of Mexico.
The aim was to foster collaborative research between researchers at UT or other institutions in Texas and researchers in Mexico. We worked with a professor at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, or the National Autonomous University of Mexico) in Mexico City who has been working with us to study green jays in Texas and in Mexico for about four or five years now.
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