This hybrid “crane jay” looks cool like hell – but it is a sign of warning

Meet the “Jay crane”, a rare offspring of a blue jay and a green jay – two common species whose evolutionary separation took place 7 million years ago. The resulting bird feathers are a mute and fashionable blue. But the wonderful discovery denies the fact that its existence can be the product of the threat of climate change for the life of birds.

In a recent article in ecology and evolution, biologists of the University of Texas in Austin describe in more detail the strange Jay, explaining how the ranges of blue and green jays could have crossed this hybrid bird. According to their analysis, green jays – a tropical bird found in Central America – migrated further north due to temperature changes. Finally, their paths crossed by Bleus Jays, a common temperate species in the east of the United States which had moved their range to the west.

“We believe that it is the first observed vertebrates which are hybridized following two species expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change,” said Brian Stokes, principal author of the study and a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas in Austin, in a press release.

A lucky discovery

In the spring of 2023, Stokes came across a “grainy” photo of a bird that looked like a blue Jay but was “clearly different”, he explained. After contacting the occasional barde who published the photo, Stokes captured the bird, took a fast blood sample, marked his leg and released it.

Back in the laboratory, Stokes and his advisor, the co-author Tim Kett, carried out a detailed analysis of the genetic information of the bird. First of all, they preselected certain parental candidates for the bird according to their scope and their physical appearance. Then they compared the DNA sequencing data of the strange Jay to the candidates.

Their investigation confirmed that the bird was the male hybrid offspring of a mother of Jay Verte and a Father Jay Bleu. The hybrid was at least two years old, “which indicates that he had survived a full year without being reported to a public database”, according to the newspaper.

Stokes and Kett continued to monitor the bird observation channels for additional observations of similar individuals, although they could not find more. However, it is interesting to note that the same individual spotted in 2023 returned to the courtyard of the same rut in June of this year.

“I don’t know what it was, but it was a bit like a random event,” said Stokes. “If he had made two houses, he would probably have never been reported anywhere.”

Natural or made by humans?

Until now, similar hybrids such as “the Grolar bear” or the “Coywolf” have appeared mainly as a product of a direct human influence, as the introduction of invasive species, said Stokes. Although climate change is undoubtedly made by humans, the Jay crane is the first hybrid that “seems to have occurred when changes under weather conditions stimulated the expansion of the two parent species,” he added.

Be that as it may, the Jay “joins an increasing list of interactions without analogue resulting from an anthropogenic change”, note the authors in the article. It is possible that, as climate change is progressing, we will see more of these unlikely unions in the wild, they added. If so, the jobs of environmentalists can grow to include the continuation of these migratory changes and new interactions – an exhausting task, given the difficulty of finding such events.

“Hybridization is probably much more common in the natural world than researchers do not know because there is so much inability to point out that these things happen,” said Stokes. “And it is probably possible in many species that we simply do not see because they are physically separated from each other, and therefore they are not lucky to try to mate.”