I have studied plants and bugs ( insects + others) and since I have been doing my trail camera stuff I have been reading up and learning on a number of mammals. Birds, on the other hand…I only know a few of them. On my cameras I get a lot of wild turkeys, quail and jays, both blue and scrub. I had not read or heard anything about jays and their alarm sounds when predators come around, I just observed it first through the videos I captured and now in person. Whenever I had daytime footage of a mountain lion, or bobcat or a fox I could hear the alarm screech from a jay. (The first one I really noticed was when I got footage of a bobcat carrying a live bunny and jumping up on a tree stump with it; the jays screeched so loud I had to turn the volume down on the video) . When the camera was triggered by a deer or a rabbit or some other prey that sound was mostly not there. Then I captured a number of videos of rabbits and deer and squirrels and even a family of quail that all reacted when hearing the alarm screech from a jay; they would stop eating or walking and listen, wait and then either move on or get off the trail in the bushes. I had never even thought about this communication. While it seems unintentionally interspecies on the part of the jay, other prey definitively pay attention to it and seem to know the basic meaning of it. Just this little bit of observing has made me much more aware of how much is really going on out there, and it is but a sliver of it. I started to listen for that same alarm screech when I walk in the woods and now I hear it a lot; I always hope it's me and not an approaching big cat that they are telling each other about. Now I wonder if the same birds eventually learn that I am not a predator to them and "relax" a bit when I approach. I have been comparing different alarm screeches but I don't have a big enough sample nor the right equipment or knowledge, but it's still interesting. Is anyone here a birder that knows about jays and other sentinel birds? Any other interesting inter species communication that one could learn about and observe while out on the trail?
