For the first time, scientists have witnessed the blue Jay and Green Ji wild hybrid offspring during a study near San Antonio, Texas.
According to a study published in the journal September 10, the hybrid bird is the product of two species whose residence boundaries have begun overplaps a few decades ago. Environment and evolution.
Blue Jess (Siankita Carteta) And Green Jay (Cyanocorax yncas) There are both types of corroses, a family of birds, including cukes and rains. Despite their similar names, Blue Jess and Green Jez are not very closely related. They do not share jeans, and their lineage is separated 7 million years ago.
Green Jay has historically been in the passionate, tropical areas of Mexico, Central America and South Texas, while most parts of East America can be found in Houston in most parts of Blue. Over the past several decades, the heat temperatures have enabled the Green Jees to expand its boundaries in the north, while the climate change and human development have both pushed Blue Jes into the West. In a part of Texas near San Antonio, now lives with both species.
Stokes, who studies Green Jess in UT Austin, got hybrid Jay through social media in 2023. A border from the San Antonio area posted a picture of extraordinary birds from the backyard of his house, and he invited Stokes to his home to observe the bird for more than two days.
Stokes said, “On the first day, we tried to catch it, but it was really helpful.” “But the next day, we became lucky.”
Stokes Jay managed to catch Jay in a twin net – a thin mesh between two poles is suspended, which is difficult for birds to see. The bird had a blue plum, but there were similar facial marks from green, and it could produce calls for both species. Stokes took a blood sample from the birds and put a band on his leg to help identify it in the future, then returned it to the forest.
The genetic analysis of the blood sample has shown that the bird was probably a female green Jay and a male blue Jay. The hybrid bird is the first leading crossing of these two species in the wild, but in the 1970s, scientists raised the green Jay and the blue Jay in prison. The appearance of the Wild Hybrid is like a bird with a taxpayer -made detained generation, now part of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.
Nevertheless, despite the first reports of both species, Jay was at least one year old when Stokes tagged it. In the next two years, no one reported the spot to Jay, but he returned to the backyard of the same San Antonio Area house in June 2025.
If there are other hybrid jes, they can be difficult to find out – outside San Antonio, there are very few people in the region where both species overlap, so the difficulties of watching the hybrid are less.
“Hybridization is probably more common in the natural world than to know about researchers, because it is so incompetent to report these things,” said Stokes.
