Meet the Texas Grue Jay
Credit: Brian Strokes
This may look like a blue jay, but it has more black on its face, no tufted crown — and one parent who wasn’t blue at all. A grainy photo on Facebook from a woman’s suburban backyard near San Antonio jumped out at University of Texas biologists Brian Stokes and Tim Keitt. When they captured the bird and tested its blood, they discovered it was actually the hybrid offspring of a blue jay and a green jay. The geographic range of the two species used to be entirely distinct, but rising temperatures have led them to overlap. Now the two jays, which would rarely have come into contact a century ago, are having closer encounters.