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 

 minutiae have caused science to put them in 

 the same family, along with ravens, rooks, 

 daws, and magpies. In his treatment of othei 

 242 



