Brian Stokes is a “birder,” and his specialty is green jays. As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, Stokes spends his free time scrolling online, sleuthing around for bird sightings across the state.
In late May 2023, Stokes stumbled upon a curious sight in the Facebook birding group “TEXBIRDS:” A bird with a green jay's crown, a blue jay's tail, and a peculiar blue throat patch.
The local who posted it, Donna Currey, asked for help in identifying it. At Stokes' request, Currey invited him to come over to her backyard and see it for himself.
“The first day, we tried to catch it, but it was really uncooperative,” Stokes told the University of Texas at Austin. “But the second day, we got lucky.”
Using a mist net — rectangular mesh and black nylon threads stretched between two poles — Stokes caught the bird as it was soaring through the backyard (after incidentally catching and freeing a dozen other birds in the process).
Quickly, Stokes took a blood sample of the bird, banded its leg to identify it in the future, and then set it free.
Remarkably, the bird appeared in Currey’s backyard again two years later, in June 2025.
“I don’t know what it was, but it was kind of like random happenstance,” Stokes said, as he questioned why the bird preferred Currey’s home. “If it had gone two houses down, probably it would have never been reported anywhere.”
On September 10, Stokes finally published his findings about the curious bird he caught in the scientific journal Ecology and Evolution.
Joined by his faculty advisor, integrative biology professor Tim Keitt, Stokes confirmed that the bird was, in fact, a male offspring of a green jay mother and a blue jay father.
Marc Airhart, who interviewed Stokes for the University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences, jokingly referred to it as a “grue jay” — but the hybrid does not have an official name.
Stokes and Keitt estimate that this is the first hybrid bird species driven by the effects of climate change.
Historically, the two distinct species have occupied separate ecosystems. Green jays are tropical birds found across Central America, Mexico, and southern Texas, while blue jays are temperate birds found across large swaths of the Eastern United States.
The researchers estimate that the two species have encountered each other with greater frequency as winters have warmed in recent decades, which has caused them to expand their natural habitats.
Although a blue jay-green jay hybrid was once bred in captivity at Fort Worth Zoological Park in 1965, this specimen marks the first time that such a bird has been found in nature since the two parent species diverged “7 million years ago.”
“We believe this hybridization event joins a growing list of increasingly unexpected outcomes of contemporaneous range expansions fueled by anthropogenic global change,” Stokes and Keitt stated.
In their study, the authors lauded the hybrid as an example of nature’s remarkable ability to adapt under pressure.
“Expansion is a major mechanism leading to hybridization,” Stokes and Keitt observed. “Given the accelerating pace of global change, we expect that novel hybrids will be an important component of future ecosystems.”
“Our observation of a novel hybrid with parents of distant ancestry highlights the increasingly surprising nature of rapidly changing ecosystems.”
In addition to noting the resilience of wild animals to adapt to their changing environments — which paints a fuller picture of how climate change is impacting vulnerable species — the authors also estimate that future hybrid species could help ecologists better analyze climate trends.
And possibly, allow them to predict climate shifts before they occur.
“As species continue to shift their ranges in response to climate change, habitat shifts, and other ecological pressures, encounters among historically allopatric taxa may become increasingly common,” the authors noted.
“Anticipating the nature and consequences of these novel interactions represents a central challenge for ecologists in the coming decades.”
They concluded their report by writing: “Our report of a novel species interaction further serves to highlight the urgency of documenting these emergent dynamics, which may foreshadow ecological shifts as climatic and broader anthropogenic changes continue to reshape biotic communities.”
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Header images via Shenandoah National Park, Brian Stokes, Chuck Homler / FocusOnWildlife.Me (CC BY-SA 4.0)
