Blue Jays

Woodland Cemetery, Burlington ON. September 29, 2020. After a stretch of warm, dry days a cold front swept across the land last night. It really stirred things up. For the many birds who had been hanging around, failing to make hay while the sun shined, last night was a time-to-get-moving wake-up call. 

With no urgent duties of my own, I headed to this quiet , well treed cemetery, eight kilometres from home, hoping for a lively morning of birds on the move. The cemetery commands a peninsula of land overlooking a long stretch of water. It lies squarely on a coastal flyway followed by thousands of fall migrants, it’s almost a bird trap. 

On my way, I noticed a large flock of Blue Jays, flying alongside me and pretty well keeping up at 40 Kmh. Hmmm well, Blue Jays are on the move, I thought and anticipated meeting up with them again as they passed the cemetery. A small group of birder photographers had gathered in their favoured spot among the headstones, but I avoided them.  Instead I found a quieter corner away from the guy-talk and one-upmanship that seems to go with the group.

A flock of jays swept low overhead, coming from the east, heading southwest, I couldn’t count them. I tried for photographs with limited success. Only this one (normally not a keeper) manages to hint at the spectacle of a sky full of Blue Jays.

A few more trickled through and I was distracted for a while by a large group of Dark-eyed Juncos.  New overnight arrivals I’m sure, certainly, the first I’ve seen since the end of April.

But jays kept appearing in loose but purposeful flocks, passing over all morning at little more than treetop height and screeching as they went. Counting them was pointless, small flocks might have been 20 birds-strong, and large flocks five or ten times as large. It went on all morning that way, there were pauses but not for long. Among these hundreds and thousands, I noted a migrating falcon very high overhead, perhaps a Merlin, and a Yellow-billed Cuckoo that seemed a bit baffled by the clamour of jays all around it as it searched for food in a thick mulberry.

It was in the first week of October last year that I celebrated Blue Jays as My Bird of the Day. I remember that day and the clamour of jays feasting on acorns. I remember recalling then how a South African birder had breathlessly said of her first Blue Jay, “What a beautiful bird!” And it surely is. This was one of today’s birds, it was among a small detachment that paused for lunch.