Another vibrantly colored, and well-known bird, is the Blue Jay. Bright and cheery, these guys are beautiful to look at and (like the Northern Cardinal) have a iconic crest on their heads.
But what if I told you, that Blue Jays aren’t actually blue, but brown?
That’s right. Like Neo in the Matrix, what you see is not the full reality. A Blue Jay’s feathers are brown, but they are physically formed in such a way that when they reflect light, they appear blue. If you look at a single Blue Jay feather and backlight it, the feather appears its true color of brown. But when you look at it from the front in normal lighting, the feather’s structure only reflects blue. Marvelous, isn’t it?
This unique feather structure is common to many blue-colored birds and has fascinated many a birder. Such feather structures are distinct from the widespread use of color pigmentation in plants and animals. For instance, you may recall that plants are green due to the pigment chlorophyll. Well, Northern Cardinals also get their red appearance from pigmentation (those pigment are carotenoids, which I mentioned in last week’s Cardinal article).
The Blue Jay can be seen year round in most of the continental United States, except for the Western third of the country.
Until next (Bird!) time,
Grover