The Birds’ Calendar » 
ever has heard its discordant cry sounding 
through the woods, noted its half defiant, half 
guilty air as it slinks among the trees, and 
caught it in the barbarous act of destroying the 
eggs or killing the young of other birds, will 
only ask contemptuously, with Shakespeare, 
** What ! is the jay more precious than the lark, 
Because his feathers are more beautiful ?” 
And he is indeed a beauty, with that rich ex; 
panse of blue that looks like a bit of sky flutter- 
ing among the trees. It is an unusual color 
among our birds, and I have somewhere read 
that it is never found in the birds of England. 
With us the jay is the most conspicuous in- 
stance, and we have besides the blue-bird, the 
black-throated blue, and the blue yellow-backed 
warblers, one or two other warblers with a 
noticeable trace of it, the indigo-bird, and the 
blue grosbeak, which is almost indigo, but rare- 
ly found so far north as New York. 
Different as the jay’s note is from that of 
the crow, it resembles it in the characteristic 
hoarseness of the latter, and certain anatomical 
minutize have caused science to put them in 
the same family, along with ravens, rooks, 
daws, and magpies. In his treatment of other 
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