A blue bird mated with a green bird...and their offspring are a scientific miracle

Dubai, United Arab Emirates - What happens when a male blue jay and a female green jay meet? This is no joke, but rather the subject of a new study that aims to describe a hybrid bird that has never been seen before in the wild.

But the biggest question that puzzles scientists is: How do we explain the existence of this mysterious bird? “We believe it is the first observed vertebrate that hybridized as a result of the range expansion of two bird species together, at least in part due to climate change,” explained Brian Stokes, a biology doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin and first author of the study published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

The bright green jay can be found in parts of South and Central America, Mexico, and a limited portion of southern Texas. But since 2000, this tropical bird's range has expanded northward hundreds of kilometers along the Rio Grande River toward San Antonio, Texas, according to study co-author Timothy Kitt.

Birdwatching enthusiasts in Central Texas noticed this spread, and shared their sightings of the emerald-colored bird on social media platforms and apps like eBird. Kitt, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that he has been following this rapid movement north since 2018. He told Ofoq News: “They are birds that you cannot mistake in the wild. When you see a green jay, you know it is definitely him.”

Stokes joined Kitt's project several years later, when he was capturing birds to take blood samples for genetic analysis and then releasing them back into the wild. While stalking social media to spot blue-green jays in May 2023, Stokes came across an interesting post in a Facebook group called “Texbirds,” where a woman in suburban San Antonio shared a photo of an unfamiliar bird that looked unlike any jay Stokes or Kitt had seen before.

“Stokes noticed that this woman had posted a photo of a strange jay, and he told me right away, so we got in the car and drove over there to look for it right away,” said Kitt. He and Stokes describe their discovery as one of the “increasingly unexpected outcomes” that emerge when global warming and land development intersect, pushing animal populations into new habitats. This could lead to unexpected animal interactions, in this case between a tropical species and a temperate species, creating ecological communities that have never been seen before, they wrote.

طائر من نوع مختلف بولاية تكساس وقد احتاجا إلى محاولات عدة لصيد الطائر الهجين. Birds from the corvidae family, which includes jays and crows, are known for their extreme intelligence.

The researchers tagged the mysterious bird and drew a blood sample for genetic analysis. ولاحظا أن الطائر أظهر صفات مميزة لكل من القيق الأزرق والقيق الأخضر، وهما نوعان ليسا قريبين جدًا من بعضهما، فهما انفصلا عن سلف مشترك منذ حوالي 7 ملايين سنة.

The bird had blue feathers on its back and tail and white spots on its wings, similar to those of the blue jay. But it lacked the spiky hair on its head that resembles the crown of the blue jay, and it had a spot above its eye that is considered a distinctive sign of the green jay.

The strange bird was following a flock of blue jays and making calls similar to them, but it was also making the clicking and vibrating sounds characteristic of green jays. Upon their return to the lab, Kitt and Stokes completed a series of genetic analyses, comparing the DNA they had collected with that of blue jays, green jays, and other jay species, and determined that the mysterious bird was the product of a male blue jay and a female green jay mating.

Another well-known example of a blue jay-green jay hybrid born in captivity was in the 1960s, when the species' natural breeding habitats were about 200 kilometers apart. The specimen is kept in a museum collection in Texas, and closely resembles the wild bird the researchers identified. "Biological surprise" For his part, Gavin Ligton, an assistant professor of biology at Buffalo State University in western New York, who has researched hybridization trends between wild birds and those not participating in the study, expressed his surprise at this mating.

He added that scientists usually assume that hybridization occurs due to a misidentification of the species, that is, two birds do not realize that they are mating with an individual of a different species. وبالنسبة لليغتون، هذا التزاوج الغريب يعد "مفاجأة بيولوجية".

"These two jay species form long-term social bonds with a partner. We expected them to be very selective about who they form these bonds with," he explained.

Furthermore, corvids are very intelligent, and the blue jay and green jay look very different from each other, so they should be able to tell them apart easily. Perhaps, Leighton speculated, it was at the end of the breeding season and the birds were under stress.

"If they are unlucky to find a member of their own species without a partner, there may be a greater risk of making a mistake," he said. Expansion of territories with rising temperatures This is a mistake that could not have happened until today, as the ranges of the blue jay and the green jay began to overlap only in the past ten years.

Blue jays, found throughout the eastern United States, began to move west, perhaps following urbanization and taking advantage of backyard bird feeders. At the same time, a recent increase in nighttime temperatures in Texas may have made the region more hospitable to tropical species, which could explain the green jay's northward expansion, says Kitt, who concludes: "Species that may not have interacted with each other for millions of years are suddenly coming into contact, and we think this is likely due to anthropogenic factors, such as climate change and habitat destruction."