The newly discovered bird (center) is a hybrid of a blue jay (left) and a green jay (right), possessing distinctive features of both species. (Image credit: Brian Stokes (center panel), Travis Maher/Cornell Lab of Ornithology/Macaulay Library (left), and Dan O'Brien/Cornell Lab of Ornithology/Macaulay Library (right).)
For the first time, scientists observed wild hybrid offspring between a blue jay and a green jay during a study near San Antonio, Texas.
According to a study published September 10 in the journal Ecology and Evolution, the hybrid bird is the product of crossbreeding between two species whose ranges began to overlap several decades ago.
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Blue jays (Cyanocitta cristata) and green jays (Cyanocorax yncas) belong to the order Corvidae, a family of birds that also includes crows and ravens. Despite their similar names, blue and green jays are not closely related. They are not members of the same genus, and their lineages diverged approximately 7 million years ago.
Green jays historically inhabited warm tropical regions of Mexico, Central America, and southern Texas, while blue jays are found throughout much of the eastern United States, as far west as Houston. Over the past few decades, warming temperatures have allowed green jays to expand their range further north, while climate change and human activity have pushed blue jays further west. The two species now coexist in a part of Texas near San Antonio.
Stokes, who studies green jays at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered the hybrid jay through social media in 2023. A birder in the San Antonio area posted a photo of the unusual bird from her backyard, and she invited Stokes to her home to observe it closely for two days.
“We tried to catch him the first day, but he was completely unruly,” Stokes said. “But on the second day, we got lucky.”
Stokes managed to capture a jay in a mist net—a fine mesh suspended between two poles, difficult for birds to see. The bird had blue plumage, but its facial markings were similar to those of green jays, and it could produce calls from both species. Stokes took a blood sample and placed a bracelet on its leg to aid in future identification, then released it back into the wild.
Genetic analysis of a blood sample revealed that the bird is likely the offspring of a female green jay and a male blue jay. The hybrid bird is the first known cross between these two species in the wild, but in the 1970s, scientists crossed a green and blue jay in captivity. The wild hybrid's appearance is similar to a captive-bred specimen, now housed in the collection of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.
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Although this is the first recorded sighting of a hybrid between the two species, the jay was at least a year old when Stokes tagged it. No further sightings of the jay were reported for the next two years, but in June 2025, it returned to the same backyard in the San Antonio area.
If there are other hybrid saplings, they may be difficult to spot, as few people live outside of San Antonio in the region where the two species' ranges overlap, so the chances of someone seeing a hybrid are low.
“Hybridization is probably much more common in nature than researchers think, because there is a great inability to report on the phenomena that occur,” Stokes said.
Skyler Ware, Social Links Navigator, Live Science Contributor
Skyler Ware is a freelance science journalist covering chemistry, biology, paleontology, and earth sciences. She was a 2023 AAAS Fellow at Science News. Her work has also appeared in Science News Explores, ZME Science, and Chembites, among others. Skyler holds a PhD in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology.
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