Blue Jay
Cyanocitta cristata
Blue Jay · Green-Wood Cemetery · 16 February 2026
A Blue Jay in the winter cemetery at Green-Wood, the oaks it lives by all around it. Jays are birds of the eastern woodlands and never far from oaks, and they stay all winter on the acorns they buried in autumn.
The blue is structural rather than pigment. There is no blue in the feather at all, just a layer of keratin that scatters blue light over a base of dark melanin, and a crushed jay feather is plain brown. A single bird buries thousands of acorns a season and forgets a good share of them, and much of the eastern forest is their forgetting.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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