Compilation of Eurasian Jays (Garrulus Glandarius) Mimicking Buzzards and Other Birds

In my video about Scarlet Elf Cups, my narration was interrupted by a Eurasian Jay (Garrulus Glandarius) mimicking a Common Buzzard (Buteo Buteo):

In this video I introduce the bird making the sound. The video is a compilation of several encounters with the Eurasian Jay I’ve had over the past few weeks. It shows them mimicking Buzzards, but also other birds, as well as grooming themselves, puffing chests and being generally cute for a bird from the Corvid family (it’s the same family of birds as the Crows, Ravens, Jackdaws and the like).

Here’s the compilation of Buzzards after their return from the migration:

The typical call of a Eurasian Jay is a screech and you’ll hear plenty of this call throughout the video. But they’re excellent mimickers of other birds and you get to see them do that too.

Eurasian Jays are hard to film birds. They are very shy and fly away at the slightest sign of a human. They fly away long before you get without distance to shoot a video, but I’ve lucked out a few times to get a few shots of them. But the video doesn’t show the hundreds of times when I heard their call and tried to approach them, but they flew away and you never catch up to them.

All in all it’s a difficult bird to film, but whereas I spend a lot of time in the woods, I have many encounters with the birds so sooner or later I am bound to get a decent shot. Here are some of the videos:

00:00 Disclaimer
00:11 Eurasian Jay eating
00:40 Eurasian Jay mimicking a Common Buzzard
00:51 Actual call of Buzzards for comparison
02:50 Eurasian Jay mimics songbirds
03:17 Eurasian Jay puffing up her chest
04:42 Eurasian Jay grooming her feathers
05:28 Eurasian Jay flies away with a screech
05:41 Characteristic call of Eurasian Jay
07:26 Captured Eurasian Jay landing on a tree
07:59 Eurasian Jay mimicking various birds

Keep rocking :o)

Mark
https://www.nophoneman.com/