Katie's Boo Jays

Remembering the birds that inspired my daughter's second word

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Getting to recognize, and maybe even get to know personally, an individual bird is one of the most rewarding elements of regularly birding in our own backyard or patch. Some of my favorite recollections of recognizable individual birds are from when my children were little.

I think the first Peabody Street birds I recognized as individuals were a pair of Blue Jays that lived on Peabody Street in the summer and fall of 1984, when my daughter Katie was a baby.

I’d been in the habit of hand-feeding some backyard squirrels.

Over that summer I noticed that two Blue Jays appeared whenever I went to the porch and whistled for the squirrels. The jays stayed up in our maple tree, watching when a squirrel took a peanut and carried it off to bury somewhere. The moment the squirrel ran off, one of the jays swooped down and dug up the peanut to eat or bury somewhere else.

At some point, the jays decided to skip the middleman and get the peanuts directly from me. After I whistled and they flew to the maple, they’d make eye contact and I’d place two peanuts on the porch railing and step back a few feet. The one who was noticeably bolder would fly in, grab a peanut, and fly off, the more timid one following. After a few minutes, they’d return and the bolder one would grab the other peanut.

Within a few days, as the bolder one started feeling more comfortable with me on the porch, it would park itself on the railing for several seconds to pick up first one peanut and then the other, appearing to weigh them with me standing just a few feet away. To test my theory, I started paying closer attention to which peanut was heavier, and yep—after picking them both up, that jay invariably flew off with the heavier one.

After a few more days, the timid one stopped following the first and started flying to the porch itself. It always grabbed the remaining peanut in one fell swoop, not alighting on the railing for even a second. At first, if I made the slightest movement it would dart off without the peanut, but as it got more comfortable, I didn’t have to be quite so still as long as I didn’t take a step toward the railing.

After a few weeks of this, I took it to the next level. When the jays flew in, I’d hold the two peanuts in my hand, holding out my arm toward them. It didn’t take long for the bolder one start to alighting on my hand, at first grabbing whichever peanut was furthest from my body, but within a few days staying there long enough to weigh them and choose the heavier peanut.

I don’t think the timid one alighted on my hand even once—no matter how long I stood there, arm extended, it stayed up in the maple until the other Blue Jay returned and took the second peanut. After a while, I gave up. As soon as the first jay grabbed one peanut out of my hand, I placed the other peanut on the railing so the timid one would get its treat, too. This routine lasted until late fall, when both birds presumably headed south.

The reason I am certain that this was 1984 is that Katie was just beginning to pull herself up to stand, and so far her only word was “mama.” The living room window facing the front porch was nice and low, just the right height for Katie to look out, and she was utterly charmed with these two colorful birds coming in so close. Whenever I asked her if she wanted to see the Blue Jays, she’d say “Boo Jay!” as she crawled straight to the window and pulled herself up to see them.

In the early 90s, I started getting invited to speaking engagements out of town, and for the first time Russ and I needed a second car. When we bought it, a 1994 Ford Aspire, I got license plates that read BOO JAY in commemoration of Katie’s second word. We had to pay $100 for the vanity plates—a lot when we were still paying double-digit interest on our mortgage and living on just Russ’s income, but it was a one-time expense. In the 30 years since, we’ve never had to pay extra when the plates are replaced.

I can’t remember for certain whether those jays returned to the neighborhood the next year. I’m pretty sure they didn’t, but that was the year I was pregnant with Tommy and I was probably not paying close attention.

Scientists can’t predict when individual Blue Jays will migrate and are pretty sure that at least some don’t return to the same place year after year, so if my jays did disappear, that’s not evidence that anything bad happened to them. I’m glad about that. There's no tragic ending to mar the memory of the lovely summer when my life intersected with these big beautiful birds, forever remembered as Katie's BOO JAYS.