Excerpt from “Zip A Dee Do Dah”

“Even without major birding credentials, I am willing to go out on a limb and declare that the kind of nest that blue jays make has never once provoked anyone to an encomium to nature's symmetry and perfection. The thing taking shape outside our window is no chambered nautilus shell, with its faultless, secreted spiral of form, the kind of form often invoked in the This Is All Just Too Exquisite To Be Random argument.

Here are some other things a blue jay’s nest does not resemble: the fine teacup of a nest made by the ruby-throated hummingbird; the public works facility nest engineered by the rufous-breasted castle builder; the evening bag-like nest of the Baltimore oriole, something an Upper East Side woman would carry to the opera proudly; the handsome Greek vases turned out by cliff swallows; the flying saucer-shaped structure made the hammerkop, eight thousand twigs formed into a dome strong enough for an adult to stand on. None of these possibilities for ordering and smoothing out chaos has much impressed the blue jay, and at the end of all their labors, what the blue jays’ nest most closely resembles is a heap of, well, trash. 

And that is what I like about it.

The blue jay nest is a fantasia of refuse, a temporary, provisional architecture made chiefly of discarded materia plucked from the sidewalks, gutters, and yards of our neighborhood, a landscape well enough tended, yet teeming in the detritus so attractive to a blue jay eye.

Here the blue jays can find a supply of tossed aside, losing, lottery scratch tickets with names like Set For Life and Pharaoh’s Gold (it’s the foil coating that catches the blue jay eye); also wooden Popsicle sticks still sticky with grape and lime flavored syrup; twine from the block of morning papers delivered to our corner Mom & Pop market; and silvery liners from Kit-Kat candy bars. In his Guide to Eastern Birds, the late great man of birds, Roger Tory Peterson, places the blue jay on the same page as the black-billed magpie, famously the creature of this and that, who gives us the verb “to magpie.” In another kind of guide, I would place the blue jay alongside the great collage artists, with Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, Jean Arp, and Louise Nevelson, all those bricoleurs of modernity who took the occasion of a rapidly fragmenting world to practice a sweet and steely recombinatory art, linking decorum and glitz, high and lo, the funny and elegiac, making a moody frisson of the commonplace. 

And however motley its heap, the blue jay is surely guided, no less than the meticulous nautilus, by some inscribed-in-nucleic-acid knowledge. This messy assembly is the blue jay way — the way the blue jay continues its kind. So these bricoleurs of the upper canopy know a good heap when they see one; and they know when that heap is fully realized. When that moment comes, the female takes up residence in her nest, and at some point she lays her eggs. Over the next few days, during the rare, fleeting moments when she hops off her nest, anyone close by our window, waiting or just lucky, will see four tiny oval eggs. There is only a glimpse: the eggs are smooth, with a faint gloss, some years an olive color, others, a gray-blue-green like the ocean on a cloudy day.

And does the blue jays’ affection for the motley and discarded give them an edge in the urban world, an advantage over fussier birds like the chickadee and lazuli bunting? I ask a serious birder, a man named Emerson Blake, and known to his friends as Chip. The answer from Chip is yes — an elaborate yes that builds into a learned riff on why birds are particular in the first place; why some are disadvantaged by a metropolitan scene; why others are having a hard time making any nests at all these days. One of the hard cases is the situation of the spotted owl, a bird that wants peace and quiet, and wants it over an immense territory, over a great hushed swath of forest. As that kind of forest disappears, the spotted owl’s endocrine system begins to shut down and its hormones cease to deliver the old imperative to mate. Other birds are very particular about building materials; if the right twig or grass is not present, they simply do not nest. It is not whim, of course. 

The absence of proper materials is a potent sign for these birds, a leading indicator, signaling that the conditions for life are not right, that the great energy and effort to create young would almost certainly fail. The kinds of birds that require certain materials or foods to breed and nest are known as specialists. The advantage of being a specialist can be very great: it often allows a bird to thrive in some uncontested niche.  Think of it — a strategy that allows a creature to smoke not only its competitors, but also competition itself. Ingenious. Thus Bachman's warbler prevailed in the southern canebrakes. Thus the ivory-billed woodpecker once lived undisturbed in virgin pine forests. Thus the snail kites of Florida eat only the apple snail, for which purpose they have grown a special beak. But the risk of being a specialist is the highest risk imaginable, a double or nothing gamble, for if canebrake, or virgin forest, or apple snails disappear, the specialist is, as Chip puts it, ‘out of business.’”

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Read the full story on this site: Zip-A-Dee-Do-Dah
©1998 Emily Hiestand; revised slightly, 2022
First published in “Watershed & Other Domestic Travels” (Beacon Press, 1998)