Green Jay
- Family
- Corvidae
- Conservation status (IUCN)
- Least Concern (2025) 6
Where and when to see the Green Jay
DraftOn the Yucatán Peninsula
It lives in forest, and in orchards and plantations close to forest, across the peninsula, but avoids wide open country. Look for noisy family groups moving from tree to tree; it sometimes visits feeders.
Where it’s reported most
- Cuxtal Ecological ReserveMérida, Yucatán
- Ruta de los CenotesPuerto Morelos, Quintana Roo
- MuyilFelipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo
- Kabah Ecological ParkBenito Juárez, Quintana Roo
When
All year
Reported all year.
Reports relative to effort
- January: 93%
- February: 97%
- March: 99%
- April: 97%
- May: 100%
- June: 83%
- July: 77%
- August: 93%
- September: 89%
- October: 86%
- November: 85%
- December: 89%
Data: eBird and other datasets via GBIF.org (CC BY 4.0), 2015–2026 · Base map: Natural Earth
Moves through forest edges and scrub in noisy family groups, eating insects, fruit and seeds. It has a wide range of calls, and a group is usually heard before it is seen.
- Identification
- A green jay with a blue and black head: black bib and face, blue on the crown and cheeks, and bright yellow outer tail feathers. On the Yucatán Peninsula it is bright yellow below and usually yellow-eyed, unlike the greener, dark-eyed birds of Texas.
- Voice
- Very vocal, with a huge range of calls: harsh rattles, a repeated “shink, shink, shink” and a dry “rassh-rassh-rassh”. One of its calls sounds like a ringing alarm bell.
What the photo doesn’t show
DraftOne more year at home
Green Jays live in family groups, and last year’s young stay with their parents until the end of the next breeding season. In Mexico and Texas these yearlings help defend the territory but don’t feed the new chicks, as their South American relatives do. 1,2
A twig for a tool
In 1981, at a refuge in southern Texas, an adult Green Jay poked a twig under loose bark, worked it back and forth and ate the insect that came out stuck to it, several times in a row. Its youngster tried the same trick and caught nothing. It was the first report of apparent tool use by wild jays. 3
One species or two?
Ornithologists still debate whether the jays of Mexico and Central America and those of the Andes, about 1,600 km apart, are one species or two. The IOC list kept them apart as Green Jay and Inca Jay until 2025, when the new world list, AviList, merged them again. Yucatán birds belong to the subspecies maya. 1,4,5
Holding its own
Unlike many forest birds, it is doing well: BirdLife estimates that its numbers in North and Central America rose between 2011 and 2021. 6
Sources
- Birds of the World (Cornell Lab): Green Jay (opens in a new tab)
- Audubon Guide to North American Birds: Green Jay (opens in a new tab)
- Wilson Bulletin 94(4): 593–594 (opens in a new tab)
- IOC World Bird List v15.2 (master list) (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia: Green jay (opens in a new tab)
- BirdLife International, Data Zone: Green Jay (opens in a new tab)
Map and months: 24,103 records from 2015–2026 from eBird, iNaturalist, and others, via GBIF.org (CC BY 4.0), in 0.1° squares (about 10 km). eBird: doi.org/10.15468/aomfnb.
Months: the species’ records ÷ all bird records that month, scaled to the busiest month. It allows for birding effort; it is not the chance of seeing it. A blank square: few or no reports, not necessarily absent.
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