Magpie Jays are all in a day's work

By Mel Carriere

Living and working a stone's throw from the Mexican border has always been a mixed blessing of sorts.  There are a lot of things that can be had in Mexico a lot cheaper than they can be acquired stateside; for instance, my wife's Lasik surgery cost a fraction of what it would have in the United States.  As long as you can find a respectable doctor, dentist, auto mechanic or even plastic surgeon, Mexico can lighten the load on your pocket book.  On the down side, runoff from the Tijuana sewage system finds its way into the Tijuana River during rainstorms and surfers stay out of the water or risk winding up dead of a staph infection, as happened recently to a local boarder who didn't heed the warnings.

There are other strange anomalies that leak across the Mexican border, and among these are pet songbirds who fly the coop, take wing and establish colonies of escapees in the wild.  In Mexico there is a booming traffic in birds that would never find their way into cages in the United States because of our strict laws regarding the capture and sale of wild birds.  In Mexico, on the other hand, although these laws certainly exist they are widely ignored, and for this reason caged wild birds abound.  When my wife was growing up in Mexico she had a lot of weird pets, a veritable menagerie of exotic animals, and one of these was a Northern Cardinal.  She tells me the bird was extremely incompatible with captivity, had a bad attitude problem, refused to eat and eventually died.

Cardinals are among the birds held captive in Mexico that have escaped and established colonies just across the border in the Tijuana River Valley.  Another songbird that is nowhere close to its home range but has still managed to eke out a precarious living in the shadow of the cliffs of its native Mexico is the Mexican Magpie Jay, which seems to have established itself in the Tijuana River Valley and other San Diego County locales.

I saw my first Magpie Jays around 2005 in the Sweetwater River Valley in Chula Vista, California.  They were completely anomalous to what I knew to be the natural local avian fauna to be, and it took me a while to figure out what I was seeing.  From a distance their sweeping long tails at first gave me the head-scratching impression that I was seeing their namesake Magpie (which are not naturally occurring in San Diego), and indeed this bird is a member of that same Corvid family that the Magpies occupy.

But the Magpie Jay is not a native San Diegan either.  The home range of this Corvid is actually the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora and farther down the coast to Jalisco.  Philip Unitt's fantastic San Diego Bird Atlas has an impressive page-long write up of this exotic species, which he poetically describes as "A creature that could have sprung from the mind of Dr. Seuss..." Unitt informs us that the Magpie Jay has nested successfully in the Tijuana River Valley.  He also confirms the existence of the birds I saw near the Plaza Bonita shopping mall, which is somewhat of a relief because it means I wasn't slipped a hallucinogenic in my coffee that morning, as I had previously supposed.  

I am writing about Magpie Jays because I spotted a pair of these elegant Seussian sprites flying into a Eucalyptus Tree as I made my mail rounds through the Tijuana River Valley today.  I have one delivery in the river valley that requires an approximate ten minute detour, and as I was going back up toward Saturn boulevard on the way out I stopped to chat with a pair of birders who reported that they had not seen much of interest.  Shortly after bidding them farewell I spotted the two Magpie Jays gliding gracefully into the Eucalyptus, steering with those grotesquely elongated tails that don't seem to serve a functional purpose at all except to puff up the bird's vanity. I immediately did a U-turn, excitedly informed the birders about what I had seen, then resumed the drudgery of my appointed rounds.

All in a day's work for a mailman/birder working the Tijuana River Valley.  Despite the area's national reputation among avian aficionados, in the four months I have been on this route I have yet to see anything notable down there; a situation which I hope will soon change as spring approaches and bird migration begins.  Although the Magpie Jay's escapee status means it cannot contribute to the length of my life list, it is nonetheless a pleasantly weird anomaly to witness on a Saturday afternoon.

Photo from:  http://trnerr.org/where-can-i-find-the-mexican-magpie-jay/