blue jay

the blue jays who live in our yard are kinder than the blue jays of my childhood, the kind of birds who divebombed unsuspecting dogs with a scream and a flash of blue, leaving tiny specks of red welling up through the fur, who screamed at small children on sidewalks with such violence parents would run out and drag the children back indoors. the blue jays in our yard have never been mean to anybody. and these birds are monstrous, bigger than all those warblers in the apple tree, bigger than the woodpeckers. not as big as a duck but if i were the sort to exaggerate, that might be what i’d say.

the birds, two of them as far as i can tell, spend their days in the front yard spruce trees, peering out from the high branches, then gliding out of the low ones to eat. because they are gentle i can sit on the front porch and watch them and quite often i do, small dog sprawled out beside me, unafraid. some days they flap right up onto the porch railing, then leave as quickly as they get there. i like them the way i am learning to like bears, pretty animals that mean me no harm as long as i’m not between them and a baby or food.

so today guthrie and i are out in the yard doing a little weeding and cutting back the mint. two kinds of mint, really, and some lemon balm. there are always birds and unless someone is singing something particularly fancy all that birdsong scoots to the background like the sounds of trucks rumbling down the road past the house or the sound of a hammer hitting nails a few roads over and further up the mountain. familiar is familiar. so i do not think at all about the soft, thick sound of birds not quite ready to fly until we are walking back to the compost bins and we walk under the back yard spruce tree, a runt among the others, a tree that has more in common with a deranged christmas tree than anything else.

although those jays spend their days in the front yard spruces, it seems that about halfway up the backyard tree they have built a nest. and the sound, louder now, a hundred rusty swingsets all going at once, is coming from just a few branches down from the nest. i look up to see four fat and still fuzzy blue jays sitting next to each other on a branch. a branch up and over across from them is one of those big, grown birds. it is yelling at the babies, teenagers, really, who are not listening closely enough. then it opens wings i wouldn’t imagine could fit in that densely branched mess and it flies past them, down and out of the tree. two of the babies flap off after it. not graceful, but enough to get themselves out of the tree and into the real air outside. the third flies around from branch to branch, a flap or two then landing. the grown bird comes back with its yelling and that third bird hits the air fast.

the last one, though, is in no hurry. it is soft around the face and its crest looks tousled, babyish. it sits on the branch a few feet away from where it has spent most of its life and listens to the other birds. the young ones have returned and they are all screaming along with the grown folks. and this last little one listens a while, then turns away from the birds and the nest and the screaming. if he had headphones he would put them on. if he had a bedroom door he would stomp through it and slam it behind him. if he had a secondhand car he would hit the gas hard and peel out. but he is the last baby bird in a runty spruce tree. he might as well get those wings going and fly.