Around 7 million years ago, green jays and blue jays went their separate evolutionary ways. One opted for the humid, tropical climates of Central America, the other chose the crisp, temperate forests of the Eastern U.S. They kept their distance, promising that never the two shall meet, let alone get close enough to mate.
Climate change messed all that up. It’s thrown off bird migratory patterns just enough so that these two separate but similar species, separated by millions of years, have finally synced back up. They’ve created a whole new type of bird called a Grue Jay—in San Antonio, of all places.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin confirmed the existence of a hybrid offspring between a green jay and a blue jay. It’s possibly the first known vertebrate hybrid created by the simultaneous expansion of each species’ range thanks to climate change.
Climate Change Just Gave Us The Grue Jay, A Whole New Species of Bird
This new hybrid currently has no name, but for now, everyone is calling it a “grue jay,” a combination of a green jay creeping north and a blue jay flying west, with their newly expanded territory overlapping, and suburban south-central Texas, where the lucky species will get to watch Victor Wembanyama play.
Its discovery is credited to a backyard birder northeast of San Antonio who snapped a grainy picture of a strange bird. It had a black mask, a white chest, and kind of grayish-blue feathers. She posted to an online birding group.
The image made it before the eyes of UT Austin grad student Brad Stokes, who immediately knew something was wrong here. So, Brad paid a visit to this recreational birder.
After a couple of days chasing the new bird around her yard, Stokes finally caught the bird in a rectangular cross-stitched net of black nylon tied between two poles known as a mist net. Stokes extracted a blood sample and then released it.
Genetic testing confirmed the Jay lovechild. The particular bird he captured in that backyard would soon vanish without a trace, only to resurface in the same backyard two years later.
What makes this especially notable is that most wild hybrid animals typically result from human activities, such as habitat destruction, invasive species introductions, or misguided zoo experiments. But this one was all Mother Nature’s doing—with some significant help from humans via our contributions to climate change.
Stokes thinks this is just the tip of the iceberg. Climate change is messing with global temperatures, causing birds to migrate in unexpected ways. We might see whole new types of birds arise, sparking a previously unpredicted mashup era of birds. And just in time for birding to explode in popularity.
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