I would make a chart of our life,
know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.
Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852
This raw gusty day
the jays with their scream
at home in the scenery.
The unrelenting
steel-cold scream of a jay,
unmelted
never flows into a song
a sort of wintry trumpet
screaming cold.
Hard, tense, frozen music,
like the winter sky itself;
the blue livery of winter's band.
February 9. The jays are more lively than usual. February 9, 1854
February 12. To make a perfect winter day like this, you must have a clear, sparkling air, with a sheen from the snow, sufficient cold, little or no wind; and the warmth must come directly from the sun. It must not be a thawing warmth. The tension of nature must not be relaxed. The earth must be resonant if bare, and you hear the lisping tinkle of chickadees from time to time and the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery of winter's band. It is like a flourish of trumpets to the winter sky. There is no hint of incubation in the jay's scream. Like the creak of a cart-wheel. There is no cushion for sounds now. They tear our ears. February 12, 1854
February 17 The jays are uttering their unusual notes. February 17, 1855
March 1. I hear the phoebe or spring note of the chickadee, and the scream of the jay is perfectly repeated by the echo from a neighboring wood. March 1, 1854
March 4. We stood still a few moments and listened to hear a spring bird. We heard only the jay screaming in the distance and the cawing of a crow. March 4, 1859
March 7. I hear several jays this morning. I think that many of the nuts which we find in the crevices of bark, firmly wedged in, may have been placed there by jays, chickadees, etc., to be held fast while they crack them with their bills. March 7, 1859
March 12. I hear a jay loudly screaming phe-phay phe-phay, March 12, 1854
March 13. I hear only crows and blue jays and chickadees lisping. Excepting a few blue birds and larks, no spring birds have come, apparently. The woods are still. March 13, 1853
May 8. A singular noise from a jay this morning. May 8, 1852
May 14. Most birds are silent in the storm. Hear the robin, oven-bird, night warbler, and, at length, the towhee's towee, chickadee's phoebe, and a preluding thrasher and a jay. May 14, 1852
June 5. A blue jay’s nest on a white pine, eight feet from ground, next to the stem, of twigs lined with root-fibres; three fresh eggs, dark dull greenish, with dusky spots equally distributed all over . . . Jay screams as usual. Sat till I got within ten feet at first. June 5, 1856
June 8. A jay’s nest with three young half fledged in a white pine, six feet high, by the Ingraham cellar, made of coarse sticks. June 8, 1855
June 10. Surveying for D. B. Clark on “College Road,” so-called, cut a line in a thick wood that passed within two feet of a blue jay's nest about four feet up a birch, quite exposed beneath the leafy branches. The bird sat perfectly still upon its large young with its head up and bill open, not moving in the least, while we drove a stake close by, within three feet, and cut and measured, being about there twenty minutes at least. June 10, 1859
July 9. The jay's note, resounding along a raw wood-side, suggests a singular wildness. July 9, 1852
July 25. The wood thrush and the jay and the robin sing around me here, and birds are heard singing from the midst of the fog. And in one short hour this sea will all evaporate and the sun be reflected from farm windows on its green bottom. July 25, 1852
August 7. The birds for some weeks have not sung as in the spring. Do I not already hear the jays with more distinctness, as in the fall and winter? August 7, 1853
August 22. A blue jay screams, and one or two fly over, showing to advantage their handsome forms, especially their regular tails, wedge-formed. August 22, 1853
August 25. How grateful to our feelings is the approach of autumn! Of late we have had several cloudy days without rain. I hear no birds sing these days, only the plaintive note of young bluebirds, or the peep of a robin, or the scream of a jay, to whom all seasons are indifferent. August 25, 1852
September 4. The hawks are soaring at the Cliffs. I think I never hear this peculiar, more musical scream, such as the jay appears to imitate, in the spring, only at and after midsummer when the young begin to fly. September 4, 1853
September 12. Amid the October woods we hear no funereal bell, but the scream of the jay. September 12, 1858
September 14 This cooler morning methinks the jays are heard more. September 14, 1854
September 16. The jay screams; the goldfinch twitters; the barberries are red. The corn is topped. September 16, 1852
September 21. I hear many jays since the frosts began. September 21, 1854
September 21. Jays are more frequently heard of late, maybe because other birds are more silent. September 21, 1859
September 25. In these cooler, windier, crystal days the note of the jay sounds a little more native. Standing on the Cliffs, I see them flitting and screaming from pine to pine beneath, displaying their gaudy blue pinions. September 25, 1851
September 25. The scream of the jay is heard from the wood-side. September 25, 1855
September 28. I hear the barking of a red squirrel, who is alarmed at something, and a great scolding or ado among the jays, who make a great cry about nothing. September 28, 1851
October 5. There are few flowers, birds, insects, or fruits now, and hence what does occur affects us as more simple and significant. The cawing of a crow, the scream of a jay. The latter seems to scream more fitly and with more freedom now that some fallen maple leaves have made way for his voice. The jay’s voice resounds through the vacancies occasioned by fallen maple leaves. October 5, 1857
October 6. The jay's shrill note is more distinct of late about the edges of the woods, when so many birds have left us. October 6, 1856
October 9. Saw a jay stealing corn from a stack in a field. October 9, 1857
October 11. Chestnuts fill the ruts in the road, and are abundant amid the fallen leaves in the midst of the wood. The jays scream, and the red squirrels scold, while you are clubbing and shaking the trees. Now it is true autumn; all things are crisp and ripe. October 11, 1852
October 11. In the woods I hear the note of the jay, a metallic, clanging sound, some times a mew. Refer any strange note to him. October 11, 1856
October 14. Jays and chickadees are oftener heard in the fall than in summer. October 14, 1852
October 18. Chickadees and jays are heard from the shore as in winter. October 18, 1852
October 20. Thus, of late, when the season is declining, many birds have departed, and our thoughts are turned towards winter (began to have a fire, more or less, say ten days or a fortnight ago), we hear the jay again more frequently, and the chickadees are more numerous and lively and familiar and utter their phebe note, and the nuthatch is heard again, and the small woodpecker seen amid the bare twigs. October 20, 1856
October 27. As I am coming out of this, looking for seedling oaks, I see a jay, which was screaming at me, fly to a white oak eight or ten rods from the wood in the pasture and directly alight on the ground, pick up an acorn, and fly back into the woods with it. This was one, perhaps the most effectual, way in which this wood was stocked with the numerous little oaks which I saw under that dense white pine grove. Where will you look for a jay sooner than in a dense pine thicket? It is there they commonly live, and build. October 27, 1860
October 29. Again, as day before yesterday, sitting on the edge of a pine wood, I see a jay fly to a white oak half a dozen rods off in the pasture, and, gathering an acorn from the ground, hammer away at it under its foot on a limb of the oak, with an awkward and rapid seesaw or teetering motion, it has to lift its head so high to acquire the requisite momentum. The jays scold about almost every white oak tree, since we hinder their coming to it. October 29, 1860
October 31. So far as our noblest hardwood forests are concerned, the animals, especially squirrels and jays, are our greatest and almost only benefactors. It is to them that we owe this gift. October 31, 1860
November 1. The white birch seeds begin to fall and leave the core bare. I now hear a robin, and see and hear some noisy and restless jays, and a song sparrow chips faintly. As I return, I notice crows flying southwesterly in a very long straggling flock, of which I see probably neither end. November 1, 1853
November 3. The jay is the bird of October. I have seen it repeatedly flitting amid the bright leaves, of a different color from them all and equally bright, and taking its flight from grove to grove. It, too, with its bright color, stands for some ripeness in the bird harvest. And its scream! it is as if it blowed on the edge of an October leaf. It is never more in its element and at home than when flitting amid these brilliant colors. No doubt it delights in bright color, and so has begged for itself a brilliant coat. It is not gathering seeds from the sod, too busy to look around, while fleeing the country. It is wide awake to what is going on, on the qui vive. It flies to some bright tree and bruits its splendors abroad. November 3, 1858
November 4. It is truly a raw and gusty day, and I hear a tree creak sharply like a bird, a phoebe. The jays with their scream are at home in the scenery. November 4, 1851
November 5. The only sounds I hear are the notes of the jays, evidently attracted by the acorns, and the only animal I see is a red squirrel. November 5, 1860
November 7. Birds are pretty rare now. I hear a few tree sparrows in one place on the trees and bushes near the river, — a clear, chinking chirp and a half-strain,— a jay at a distance; and see a nuthatch flit with a ricochet flight across the river, and hear his gnah half uttered when he alights. November 7, 1855
November 10. Hearing in the oak and nearby a sound as if someone had broken a twig, I looked up and saw a jay pecking at an acorn. There were several jays busily gathering acorns on a scarlet oak. I could hear them break them off. They then flew to a suitable limb and, placing the acorn under one foot, hammered away at it busily, looking round from time to time to see if any foe was approaching, and soon reached the meat and nibbled at it, holding up their heads to swallow, while they held it very firmly with their claws. (Their hammering made a sound like the woodpecker’s.) Nevertheless it sometimes dropped to the ground before they had done with it. November 10, 1858
November 11. The jays are seen and heard more of late, their plumage apparently not dimmed at all. November 11, 1853
November 13. I see some feathers of a blue jay scattered along a wood-path, and at length come to the body of the bird. What a neat and delicately ornamented creature, finer than any work of art in a lady’s boudoir, with its soft light purplish-blue crest and its dark-blue or purplish secondaries (the narrow half) finely barred with dusky. It is the more glorious to live in Concord because the jay is so splendidly painted. November 13, 1858
November 16. I hear deep amid the birches some row among the birds or the squirrels, where evidently some mystery is being developed to them. The jay is on the alert, mimicking every woodland note. What has happened? Who 's dead? The twitter retreats before you, and you are never let into the secret. November 16, 1850
November 16. In my two walks I saw only one squirrel and a chickadee. Not a hawk or a jay. November 16, 1860
November 18. I am prepared to hear sharp, screaming notes rending the air, from the winter birds. I do, in fact, hear many jays, and the tinkling, like rattling glass, from chickadees and tree sparrows. November 18, 1855
November 26. It is worth the while to have these thickets on various sides of the town, where the rabbit lurks and the jay builds its nest. November 26, 1859
November 30. Looking into a cleft in [a hornbeam] about three feet from the ground, which I thought might be the scar of a blazing, I found some broken kernels of corn, probably placed there by a crow or jay. This was about half a mile from a corn-field. November 30, 1857
December 31. The blue jays evidently notify each other of the presence of an intruder, and will sometimes make a great chattering about it, and so communicate the alarm to other birds and to beasts. December 31, 1850
January 7. January thaw. Take away the snow and it would not be winter but like many days in the fall. The birds acknowledge the difference in the air; the jays are more noisy, and the chickadees are oftener heard. January 7, 1851
January 8. We discover a new world every time that we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow. I see the jay and hear his scream oftener for the thaw. January 8. 1860
January 15. He [Rice]thinks he has seen one of these jays stow away some where, without swallowing, as many as a dozen grains of corn, for, after picking it up, it will fly up into a tree near by and deposit so many successively in different crevices before it descends. January 15, 1861
February 2. The shade of pines on the snow is in some lights quite blue . . . The scream of the jay is a true winter sound. It is wholly without sentiment, and in harmony with winter. February 2, 1854
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Blue Jay
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025
