Blue Jay sighted near Dawson City

Observation by Richard Reid:

I saw a Blue Jay flying over one of the old settling ponds on Bonanza Creek Road near the junction with the highway. This is near Dawson City, Yukon, Canada. It wasn't a Stellar's Jay. Unfortunately it happened too fast to get a picture.

Comment from Gemini:

This observation from the Dawson City area, if validated, would be the furthest north that a Blue Jay has been documented. The observation from Whitehorse YT from 2020 (Tharian Botting, 2020) is noteworthy. The observer was unsure if they saw a Blue Jay or a Steller's Jay. The two species look similar. Blue Jays are commonly found in eastern and central North America but are rare in western North America (BirdLife International 2016). There is a well-documented expansion of Blue Jays into the Pacific Northwest (Starzomski 2019, Nance 2019) where they may be hybridizing with Steller's Jays (Nance 2019) and they may continue to expand northward. Observers are urged to document any sightings of Blue Jays or jays that cannot be identified to species level with photos or videos whenever possible. A good platform for sharing these observations and for more bird information generally is eBird (see link).

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Citations

BirdLife International. 2016. Cyanocitta cristata. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T22705611A93884285. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T22705611A93884285.en. Accessed on 10 October 2024.

eBird. 2024. eBird: An online database of bird distribution and abundance [web application]. eBird, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Available: http://www.ebird.org. (Accessed: Date [10 October 2024]).

Nance, Stephantom. 2019. "With all the Blue Jay sightings in Cascadia lately, I wonder if we’ll see an increase of hybrids with Steller’s Jays in the next decade or so." Twitter, 28 October. Tweet.

Starzomski, Brian. 2019. "Blue Jay on campus today - a rare bird for Vancouver Island! #UVic #yyj." Twitter, 1 November. Tweet.

Tharian Botting. 2020. "A rare Jay spotted in Whitehorse. But was it a Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) or Steller's Jay (Cyanocitta stelleri)?" Local Environmental Observer Network. https://www.leonetwork.org/observations/5538. Accessed on 10 October 2024.