Birders in Texas are used to seeing blue jays. Some are familiar with the flashier green jays that occasionally venture up from Mexico. But in May 2023, a backyard birder northeast of San Antonio spotted something no field guide could explain: a bird with a green jay’s crown, a blue jay’s tail, and a unique blue throat patch seen in neither species.
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It wasn’t just a unique color variation-it was something far more unusual. The bird, confirmed through genetic testing, was a wild hybrid between a green jay and a blue jay, the first ever documented in nature. According to researchers, it may also be one of the first known vertebrate hybrids caused by climate-driven range shifts.
The discovery began online. Brian Stokes, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin studying green jays, monitors birding posts on social media to help track sightings across the state. That’s how he came across a photo in a Facebook bird-watching group posted by Donna Currey, who noticed the strange-looking bird in her yard and couldn’t identify it. Currey invited Stokes to her house to check it out.
A rare blue jay-green jay hybrid photographed in a Texas backyard northeast of San Antonio in 2023. Researchers say it may be the first of its kind ever found in the wild. (Brian R. Stokes)
When he arrived, the bird was immediately striking. It had eye and crown markings typical of a green jay and a back and tail pattern like a blue jay. Its chin and throat were blue-a trait seen in neither parent species. Its vocalizations were also unusual, combining blue jay-like calls with the rattles and bill-clicks more often heard from green jays in South Texas. The researchers estimated it was about two years old at the time of the sighting.
Stokes attempted to capture the bird during that first visit using a mist net-a fine mesh stretched between poles, commonly used by ornithologists to catch and release birds. “The first day, we tried to catch it, but it was really uncooperative,” Stokes said. “But the second day, we got lucky.”
On his second attempt, he successfully caught the bird, took a blood sample, banded it, and released it. Then it disappeared-until June 2025, when it unexpectedly returned to the same yard. It wasn’t caught again, but the sighting helped confirm the bird had survived at least two more years in the wild.
A blue jay, one of the two parent species behind a rare hybrid discovered in a Texas backyard. (pchoui/Getty Images/iStockphoto)
The bird’s genetic analysis, conducted by Stokes and his faculty advisor, integrative biology professor Tim Keitt, confirmed it was a male hybrid-the offspring of a green jay mother and a blue jay father. Their findings were published on Sept. 10, 2025 in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The two parent species diverged seven million years ago and, until recently, did not naturally come into contact.
“We think it’s the first observed vertebrate that’s hybridized as a result of both parent species expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change, Stokes said.
In the 1950s, green jays were limited to deep South Texas, while blue jays were not typically found west of Houston. The two species occupied separate ecosystems-green jays in tropical forest edges, blue jays in temperate woodlands and suburbs. But as winters in Texas have warmed and both species have expanded their ranges, their territories now overlap, especially around the San Antonio area. The researchers suggest that artificial feeding stations may have further facilitated contact between the species.
The hybrid itself has not been given an official name, but Marc Airhart, a science writer for UT Austin’s College of Natural Sciences, jokingly referred to it as a “grue jay.”
The first known blue jay-green jay hybrid was produced in captivity in 1965 at the Fort Worth Zoological Park and is now preserved in a museum collection. (Pulich, W. M. and R. M. Dellinger (1981))
It is not the first time the two species have produced offspring. In 1965, a blue jay-green jay hybrid was bred in captivity at the Fort Worth Zoological Park. That bird, now preserved in the University of Texas at Arlington’s collection, had dominant blue jay coloration, with only faint hints of green jay traits. But the 2023 bird represents the first known instance of this hybrid occurring in the wild.
Using eBird data and climate niche modeling, the researchers estimated that the current area of range overlap between the two species covers about 5,200 square kilometers in Texas. Under moderate climate change projections, that zone could shift more than 100 kilometers north by mid-century, increasing the chances of further hybridizations.
A shows the region of the study. The red square delineates extent of maps for panels B and D. B shows green jay and blue jay occurrences, with black points indicating localities of recorded co-occurrence. C shows eBird recordings of green and blue jay co-occurrences per year. Gray bars are the raw count of all checklists each year which record a co-occurrence. D shows green and blue jay climate niche distributions based on MaxEnt using climate norms of 1991–2020 and climate norms for ssp245 emission projection for 2041–2060. Light blue and green areas represent current predicted climatic niches of blue and green jays respectively. The orange area represents current predicted climatic niche overlap between both species. Blue and green lines represent boundary of future projected distributions. (Brian R. Stokes, Timothy H. Keitt)
In their paper, the authors wrote that “novel hybrids will be an important component of future ecosystems” as global temperatures rise and species redistribute. “Our observation of a novel hybrid with parents of distant ancestry highlights the increasingly surprising nature of rapidly changing ecosystems.”
Stokes believes this case may be part of a broader pattern-one that scientists are only beginning to document. “Hybridization is probably way more common in the natural world than researchers know about because there’s just so much inability to report these things happening,” he said. “And it’s probably possible in a lot of species we just don’t see because they’re physically separated from one another, and so they don’t get the chance to try to mate.”
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