To tell the truth, the jay is not the fiercely courageous and militantly aggressive biped his harsh cries and erected crest might lead one to suppose. His aspect is doubtless frightful to some small birds, but most of them recognize in him much of the Pistolian braggart. I have seen a house-wren, about the size of a large colored gentleman's thumb, drive him away from her vine-shaded dwelling. Robins quickly put him to flight, and so, too, do catbirds and cardinals. Even the mourning dove (gentlest of birds) does not fear to measure her mild weapons with his; and one of the most amusing spectacles I ever witnessed was the comical bluff of a dove who puffed out her breast, fierce as a lamb, and literally pushed the swash-buckling blue jay clean off the feed board.
That the jay does not always exercise the discretion of which the timid proverb speaks, the crown of my head can very well testify. One pleasant afternoon, while I was breathlessly pursuing the phantom of an idea through the syntactical mazes of a freshman theme, I became aware of the sharp screaming of a pair of jays directly beneath my open window. I glanced out and saw (item) one baby jay squatting all hunched up on the close-cut lawn in the sunlight; (item) one long, lithe, black cat in the shadow of the syringa bush, blinking its greedy yellow eyes and moving its tail with a gentle, snaky, anticipatory motion; and (item) two frantic parent jays darting viciously at the black sphinx, and shrieking like a couple of suffragettes in the hands of a pair of miserable London bobbies. I watched the little drama until I saw the cat quivering for the spring; whereupon, forsaking the rôle of spectator, I threw my bottle of red ink and drove the dark marauder from the field. Surely never was preceptorial red ink put to more humane uses.
As I turned back to my themes, it occurred to me that here was the very opportunity I had been looking for. My favorite hobby is taking bird pictures, and I had long desired a picture of a young jay. Most fledgelings bear a ludicrous likeness to very old men. They wear an expression of solemn and pessimistic wisdom such as comes only to those who have looked long on the vanities of mankind. And it has always seemed to me that the infant jay bears a weird resemblance to England's Grand Old Man, Mr. Gladstone, after he had passed the prime of old age. Out of regard, then, for the great Liberal minister, and also because I am no rifler of nests, I seized my old black hat and a camera, and dashed downstairs. My plan was to drop the hat over the unsuspecting fledgeling so that I could pick him up without any fuss, and pose him on the grape-vine behind the house. But the young rascal, divining my intention, hopped away, and kept with exasperating nicety just out of reach. Finally, by dint of much scrambling along on my knees, taking care to preserve as innocent an expression as I could, I managed to clap the hat over him. But as I took him out from the sudden gloom, he gave one terrified shriek, and the next instant BING! something sharp, something penetrating, something entirely unexpected, struck me on the head. It was the marvellously efficient beak of Mr. Jay.