Voice imitator jay
The impostor in the front yard – don’t fall for that bird
Jay usually croak. The melodic meowing of the buzzard is a more pleasant sound
© Bildagentur-online / Schaef-McPhoto / Picture Alliance
Perhaps you are also flying through the settlement: the jay. The harmless-looking bird has mastered a trick that almost everyone falls for.
It happened while walking on the outskirts of Hamburg. There, where narrow streets merge into field paths, the meowing, drawn-out call of a buzzard could clearly be heard from a treetop. Such a bird of prey is an eye-catcher just because of its size – it is about the size of a chicken. So I searched the thick foliage of the tree with my eyes for the suspected buzzard and saw – a jay.
There sat the slender, reddish-brown fellow with his distinctive blue and black banded feathers on his wings and made a buzzard. Quite regularly, and apparently with growing enthusiasm, he imitated the call of the bird of prey.
Jay are much smaller than a buzzard – about the size of small pigeons. Apparently he had practiced well, because he mastered the buzzard sound perfectly, at least to my ears. I am probably not the only one who fell for his imitation. After this encounter I saw the bird several times and, above all, heard it. Since then he has lost his nickname: the “impostor”.
Jay also imitate hawks or sparrowhawks
If you dig through the relevant ornithological literature and nature videos on YouTube, you will see that the jay is known for imitating the voices of other birds. Some copies also have a few hawk or woodpecker covers on them. Of the latter, however, “only” the singing – not the knocking on the tree, that is probably too strenuous for the jay.
Common jays caw their way through life, but strictly speaking they are songbirds. In the literature one reads that one of his own sounds comes relatively close to the buzzard singing. So it’s often not entirely clear whether he’s singing like a jay – or committing some kind of ornithological copyright infringement.
With his talent for foreign languages, the jay is not an isolated case. Starlings, for example, are also polyglot and even sing along the tones of cell phones. We know of migratory birds that they sometimes bring songs with them from their African winter quarters and perform here in Germany. Animals also apparently take educational leave.
Why does the jay speak foreign languages? Nobody knows
In general, birds sing – and there it is always the males, by the way – to delimit their territories. In the case of the jay, however, scientists have not yet been able to clarify why it imitates chants of other species. Apparently, this behavior does not serve to mark the territory, it is said. There must be another reason, but only the animals know that.
So maybe the jay imitates the bird of prey for fun – or to feel like a real buzzard once a day.
Sources: Nabu.de, “Bird & nature“
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