But jays are jays, and it were unfair to demand from them a standard of conduct that even human beings, with all their centuries of moral education, find it hard to apply. As a matter of fact the only jay I ever caught red-beaked at such murderous work was the one in the alley, and my field of observation has extended clear from the coast of Maine part way to the Rocky Mountains. Yet if a man from Mars were to pick up a bundle of newspapers, and could make out the strange little characters imprinted thereon, he would probably infer that murder was a trade common enough among human beings, particularly to-day. He would see it as a highly organized and severely technical activity carried on by whole nations under the direction of their respective governments. It must be said, however, that although the sensitive nerve of national honor seems oftenest to reside in the national belly, nations rarely murder with the object of eating their victims. And those jays that murder are censurable chiefly in this: they have learned so little from humanity’s civilized forbearance.
To tell the truth, the jay is not the fiercely courageous and militantly aggressive biped his harsh cries and erected crest might lead one to suppose. His aspect is doubtless frightful to some small birds, but most of them recognize in him much of the Pistolian braggart. I have seen a house-wren, about the size of a large colored gentleman’s thumb, drive him away from her vine-shaded dwelling. Robins quickly put him to flight, and so, too, do catbirds and cardinals. Even the mourning dove (gentlest of birds) does not fear to measure her mild weapons with his; and one of the most amusing spectacles I ever witnessed was the comical bluff of a dove who puffed out her breast, fierce as a lamb, and literally pushed the swash-buckling blue jay clean off the feed board.
That the jay does not always exercise the discretion of which the timid proverb speaks, the crown of my head can very well testify. One pleasant afternoon, while I was breathlessly pursuing the phantom of an idea through the syntactical mazes of a freshman theme, I became aware of the sharp screaming of a pair of jays directly beneath my open window. I glanced out and saw (item) one baby jay squatting all hunched up on the close-cut lawn in the sunlight; (item) one long, lithe, black cat in the shadow of the syringa bush, blinking its greedy yellow eyes and moving its tail with a gentle, snaky, anticipatory motion; and (item) two frantic parent jays darting viciously at the black sphinx, and shrieking like a couple of suffragettes in the hands of a pair of miserable London bobbies. I watched the little drama until I saw the cat quivering for the spring; whereupon, forsaking the rôle of spectator, I threw my bottle of red ink and drove the dark marauder from the field. Surely never was preceptorial red ink put to more humane uses.
As I turned back to my themes, it occurred to me that here was the very opportunity I had been looking for. My favorite hobby is taking bird pictures, and I had long desired a picture of a young jay. Most fledgelings bear a ludicrous likeness to very old men. They wear an expression of solemn and pessimistic wisdom such as comes only to those who have looked long on the vanities of mankind. And it has always seemed to me that the infant jay bears a weird resemblance to England’s Grand Old Man, Mr. Gladstone, after he had passed the prime of old age. Out of regard, then, for the great Liberal minister, and also because I am no rifler of nests, I seized my old black hat and a camera, and dashed downstairs. My plan was to drop the hat over the unsuspecting fledgeling so that I could pick him up without any fuss, and pose him on the grape-vine behind the house. But the young rascal, divining my intention, hopped away, and kept with exasperating nicety just out of reach. Finally, by dint of much scrambling along on my knees, taking care to preserve as innocent an expression as I could, I managed to clap the hat over him. But as I took him out from the sudden gloom, he gave one terrified shriek, and the next instant BING! something sharp, something penetrating, something entirely unexpected, struck me on the head. It was the marvellously efficient beak of Mr. Jay.
I did not try to reason with him or placate him in wheedling tones. The ambient air was too full of a shrapnel burst of screaming, darting, pecking, whirling, shrieking blue jay. His shrill and angry cries, moreover, called to his aid three other jays, and such a stream of feathered Billingsgate followed as, I felt sure, must fix the eyes of all the neighborhood upon me. And so I retreated to the house, endeavoring in my gait to preserve that dignity of bearing which is generally supposed to be the fruit of an academic life. But the jay, with the uncomfortable persistence of a bee or a small heel-snapping terrier, pursued me to the very door, and might have chased me upstairs had it not been for the screen. After that I decided never again to attempt kidnapping a jay without the protection of a policeman’s helmet.
But the fierce detractors of the blue jay will doubtless scoff at this as evidence of a sometimes resolute daring. I do not resent the implied aspersion of my own courage; I am content to leave that to the judgment of my readers. There is, however, one bit of commendation to which even they must “assent with civil ear,” as a freshman of mine put it. The blue jay is almost humanly intelligent. Mind, I do not argue that he can, offhand, give you the distinction between free verse and a page from a real poet’s note-book, or that he can explain precisely why certain matters are deleted by the British censors. But with the intrepidity of a new Congressman delivering a speech in the Record, I dare assert, “without fear of successful contradiction,” that the blue jay is among the most intelligent of feathered bipeds.
Not long ago, during a particularly sharp attack of bitter weather, with frosty bayonets in the air but no snow on the ground, I was holding a conference in the English office with one of my students, a girl whose sweet deep eyes gave no flicker of understanding as I tried to make clear to her the difference between a sentence and a clause. To conceal my sorrow I stepped to the window and gazed off through the grayish-blue beeches with their dead brown leaves shivering in the keen air, trying, meanwhile, to recall what principle of pedagogic efficiency I had failed to employ. Presently a blue jay with something white in its beak alighted upon the twisted limb of a maple not a rod from the window, and began a close inspection of the rough bark. He found what he was looking for, a hole; and into this he thrust the white substance which he carried in his beak, suet possibly, from the feed-board below, or a bit of bread. He cocked his head on one side and eyed the little cache in a thoughtful manner. Then he dropped to the ground.
I thought that was the end, but I was mistaken. Soon he shot up to the limb, this time with a dead leaf in his beak. I watched intently and saw him carefully lay the leaf over the hole where he had hidden the suet. A gust of wind, however, blew the leaf off the limb, and sent it swirling to the ground. Quick as a hawk the jay swooped after it in an ineffectual attempt to capture it while it was still in the air. They reached the ground together. Convinced apparently that the leaf was too large, he selected another, much smaller, and carried it up to the limb. This time he did not merely lay the leaf over the hole; he had learned his lesson. Instead, he rammed the leaf into the hole on top of the suet, a really difficult job, and packed it firmly with his beak. It was safe from the other jays if not from the inquisitive redheaded woodpecker who lived only a few branches away. Now all you host of cocksure psychologists, was it instinct or reason that led the jay?
I know it has been argued that since a jay will attack a stuffed owl placed near his nest, he must be without the power of reason. The test seems hardly fair, for the ghoulish mystery of the taxidermist is known to no animal but man. Thus at the very start the jay is laid under an unreasonable handicap. Consider, too, the ingeniously cruel nature of this test; it pierces him as it were in the eye of his most sensitive instinct. Even human parents, faced by an ordeal at all comparable to this in sudden poignancy, would scarcely act in a manner calmly rational. What mother, leaving her infant slumbering in the cradle, and suddenly returning to find a brutal visaged mannikin bent over it in a posture of menace, would expend the millionth of a second in the psychologist’s reflective delay? Like the jay, she would act in such a situation from instinct alone, nor would we consider her deficient in intelligence.