Lovebirds In A Warming World: How Climate Change United Two Jays To Create A First-Ever Hybrid Species

What Do You Get When You Cross A Blue Jay And Green Jay?

Brian Stokes knew he might be onto something when he saw an interesting bird show up on a social media post.

“I quickly recognized that it wasn't a blue jay, at least a full blue jay,” said Stokes, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas in Austin, in an interview with weather.com. “We thought maybe it was a hybrid of some sort. That's pretty common in birds.”

He should know. He’s currently working on his dissertation on green jays in Texas, and this evolutionary marvel just came out of the blue.

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“We thought it was likely a hybrid between a green jay and blue jay, which was not something that has happened in the wild before,” explained Stokes.

Stokes drove to where the bird was spotted, trapped it and took some blood samples, and confirmed that the bird was a hybrid. The first of its kind!

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Blue jays and green jays are separated by 7 million years of evolution, and there has never been any documentation of a hybrid between the two.

So after millions of years, what was the link that caused these two species to cross paths?

Climate change.

“This was just the first example of a vertebrate species that was so clearly linked to hybrid or to climate change that we could find,” said Stokes.

How Climate Change May Have Brought These Two Love Birds Together

As the climate has warmed, green jays have expanded their range northward. Typically, the farthest north this tropical bird would migrate would be the Lower Rio Grande Valley along the Texas-Mexico border. However, since the 1960s, they have slowly expanded northward by as much as 125 to 150 miles.

This has created a crossover where the species are found; now, the rest is history.

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“We had been interested in what was going to happen when the species range made contact with the blue jay range, and we had kind of just assumed they'd be really antagonistic with one another,” explained Stokes. “So we were very surprised that this was one of the possible results - offspring between the two species.”

Stokes explained that many species are expanding their range poleward as a result of climate change. Therefore, scientists are expecting hybridization — due to climate change — to become more likely in the coming years.

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While it’s unknown what new or different characteristics this new species of bird will exhibit, there are some theories floating around that scientists are looking into.

“You could hypothetically imagine that, a really well heat-adapted species like the green jay, if it were to keep moving hybrids into blue jay territory, and those hybrids were to mate with full blooded blue jays, potentially some heat adaptations could be transferred to blue jays,” said Stokes.

This one-of-a-kind jay might be just the beginning. As climate change continues to alter habitats and migration patterns, researchers say more species could find themselves overlapping, and possibly interbreeding, in ways we’ve never seen before.

Bird Baby Names?

While this new species hasn’t been officially named yet, some are referring to it as a “Gru Jay.”

However, the woman who first spotted the bird and posted it on social media is referring to it as “Henry.”

Jennifer Gray is a weather and climate writer for weather.com. She has been covering some of the world's biggest weather and climate stories for the last two decades.