In Mandarin, there’s a particular character: 青 (“qing”). The word generally is translated to blue or green. It’s not as commonly used nowadays, as there are also separate words for blue and green, but I always think about it whenever people can’tagree on if something is blue or green. I bring this up because it reminds me of a bird that we’re going to discuss today.
Odds are good that you’ve seen a blue jay. And if you’ve been to southern Texas, you might have even spotted a green jay before. (If you’re not familiar, look up a green jay; I promise whatever you’re picturing is not the same as the real thing.) But how about a jay that’s both?
In 2023, such a bird was spotted in the wild for the first time in San Antonio, Texas. The hybrid had blue feathers and a back and tail pattern like a blue jay, but its head was more similar to a green jay’s. However, this bird also had a blue upper chin and throat, which aren’t features found in either parent species.
A few months later, this same individual was seen following a blue jay flock. The bird seemed to be calling back and forth with the flock, though it also produced a few green jay calls. Shortly afterwards, the hybrid was captured by researchers, who banded the bird and took a blood sample. They also examined the bird and learned that it was a male over a year old. By analyzing DNA from the blood sample, they determined that the hybrid had a green jay mother and a blue jay father. The hybrid was released and wasn’t seen again until the summer of 2025.
I’m a believer in the inherent value of existence, and I think that applies to this hybrid. It is noteworthy that this bird exists at all, especially since we’ve never seen this particular combination in the wild before. (There is another blue x green jay hybrid on record, but this one was produced in captivity in 1965.) But there are deeper reasons for the novelty of the hybrid as well.
Bird hybrids are not uncommon, but most vertebrate hybrids have parents from closely related species. Blue and green jays do not fall into this category; they are only distantly related, as the last time they shared an ancestor was about 7.5 million years ago. Additionally — and perhaps, most importantly — blue and green jays historically have been isolated from each other, meaning they were living in different areas that didn’t share much overlap.
However, this is changing. Using data from eBird — a citizen science database that collects information on bird sightings — researchers found that the number of reported interactions between the two species has risen since 2000. Researchers also used climate data to build models showing each species’ current and future ranges (the area where a species is found), and where the two species might overlap.
The ranges of both green and blue jays have grown in recent years. In the United States, green jays have historically only been found in southern Texas. However, in the last 20 years, green jays have also been moving northward into central Texas. Based on the models, green jay range expansion seems to be linked to warmer temperatures and less snow, which are results of global warming.
Blue jays have also expanded their range over the last few decades, moving into south and west Texas. Unlike green jays, it’s not clear if climate change helped blue jays increase their range. What’s more certain is that blue jays seem to increase their range in the wake of human settlement. In other words, as humans move into more and more areas, blue jays follow.
Though green and blue jay range expansions may not have been caused by the exact same reasons, anthropogenic (human) activity influenced both expansions, even if indirectly, since the current era of global warming is largely caused by human activity. This means that the green x blue jay hybrid is not only the result of two distantly-related species, but it is also the result of an anthropogenically-driven no-analog (unprecedented) species interaction.
Human activity isn’t only affecting the ranges of blue and green jays. These two species most likely aren’t the only no-analog interactions that we’ll be seeing. This hybrid probably also won’t be the last new one we see. As the climate warms, more species will continue moving into entirely new areas and more species will come into contact with other species they have never interacted with before. These new encounters might give us insight as to how climate change and other anthropogenic causes are changing the systems of the natural world.
Today’s content was based on “An Intergeneric Hybrid Between Historically Isolated Temperate and Tropical Jays Following Recent Range Expansion,” a 2025 paper by Brian R. Stokes and Timothy H. Keitt.