The other morning I was out in my garden just after sunrise looking at a song thrush which had already been singing for hours in a sycamore tree. The sunrays had just caught its breast and it was looking almost pink.
Then I noticed two larger pink birds sitting in a tree near by. They were two jays, but they were sitting as close to each other as two turtle doves. They were both preening a lot, and shivering their wings. It was, I think, too early in the year for them to be getting down to the business of mating and breeding, but there was certainly a spring air of intimacy about them.
The thrush and the jays were the only birds about, and a line of a Shakespeare song came into my head. Autolycus’s cheerful song, When daffodils begin to peer, in The Winter’s Tale, includes the passage: “The lark that tirra lirra chants /With heigh! with heigh! the thrush and the jay.”
I had never thought before about this odd linking together of the thrush and the jay, or if I had, I had supposed that “jay” was only there for the rhyme (farther on, with “hay”). But suddenly I wondered if Shakespeare had not seen a thrush singing and some jays flirting at the same time, just as I was seeing them now, with my daffodils also “peering”, just about to open.
This pair of jays had spent the winter together, I believe, for since last autumn I have often seen a pair around the garden. Jackdaws, which belong to the same family as jays, the crow family, are starting to sit side by side in pairs in the same cosy-looking way, but I had not seen jays sitting like this before.
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What will be seen in the next month or so is small flocks of jays gathering in trees, and then flying out, with one trooping after the other to another tree. Magpies, also members of the crow family, gather in the same way in early spring, but much more conspicuously, with a lot of loud chattering. When there are 12 magpies in a bare tree, all pointing their long tails in different directions, it looks like a giant pincushion.
Both the magpie and the jay flocks appear to be made up of first-year birds that have not got a mate yet, and are now in the process of forming pairs. In fact next Thursday, Valentine’s Day, is the day on which birds are traditionally said to pair up.
What to look out for
Generally described as a croak, the raven’s utterance is in fact a more fully voiced affair than that of either rook or crow; it resonates in the upper air where these majestic birds soar high over moors and sea cliffs, often breaking abruptly out of a glide, to tumble hundreds of feet downwards
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Details from Birdline, 0906 8700222 (60p a min)