The story of the bird
The crest is raised. One foot grips the oak branch, the amber leaves falling in the background, the deep navy plumage catching whatever light autumn gives. This is the seasonal plate, the Blue Jay at his most consequential moment of the year.
In October, Cyanocitta cristata is working. A single jay caches between three and five thousand acorns each autumn, carrying two or three at once in an expandable throat pouch and a fourth in the bill, flying up to five kilometres from the source tree to bury them in soft soil at the edge of clearings. He marks each cache by spatial memory. He returns through winter to dig them up. He forgets enough of them, every year, to plant trees. Ecologists credit the Blue Jay with the post-glacial northward spread of eastern oak forest, a process that moved faster than gravity or wind or squirrels could account for. The leading candidate in the 1989 Johnson and Webb paper in the Journal of Biogeography is the bird now perched above the autumn leaves in this plate.
The blue itself is structural, not pigment. Backlit, the feather goes brown. In forward October light it is cobalt, pure and architectural.
He pairs for life. He incubates eggs alongside the female. He lives, in some cases, to twenty-six years.
Drawn in the close, unhurried manner of the Audubon tradition, with the bird held in the one pose that contains the whole season.
