Nothing heralds the coming of Easter for me more than the call of a blue jay on a sunny, cool spring day when flowers and trees are just beginning to bloom. The call sometimes has two notes at once, creating a distinctive harmonic sound, and it’s music to my ears as Easter approaches.
Why the blue jay? For most of my growing up years we went to my maternal grandparents’ house in Orange, Texas for Easter. It felt like a sacred pilgrimage as we left home at dawn, drove to Tyler and descended down through the Piney Woods passing farms and small towns, lumber yards and sawmills, dogwoods and sumac. Then, during our four days in Orange we’d visit extended family and friends, play in the shady green yard and take long walks around the pretty town full of old houses, old trees and azaleas. And then on Sunday, there’d be church, lunch, an Easter egg hunt with a white coconut bunny cake, and then we’d pile into the car for the six-hour drive home.
While we were in Orange, it seemed like everything we did was accompanied by the call of the blue jays. You couldn’t always see them in the trees — a mix of pines, oaks, pecans and palms where the Piney Woods meet the Texas Gulf Coast. You might see a flash of blue in your peripheral vision, but their sound was always there.
I was fascinated by the unusual call of the blue jays because we didn’t seem to have them in Richardson, at least not in our part of town. Maybe it was because our neighborhood was carved out of cotton fields and we didn’t have the large native trees they had in Orange. We had ashes, fruitless mulberries, redbuds and other nursery-bought trees that attracted mostly sparrows and maybe mockingbirds. I remember my father occasionally pointing out scissor-tailed flycatchers, but mostly it was just sparrows. They were seemingly everywhere. They made little chirping sounds, and with a lot of them, there was a lot of that sound.
We see blue jays often this time of year and into the summer at our house in the oldest neighborhood of Garland where there are plenty of oaks and pecans. They enjoy visiting the bird bath we have in one of our backyard beds. They’ll come down out of the vitex tree, sometimes two at a time, and slosh and flap around with a frenzy and then fly back to the vitex to dry off. Sometimes they’ll come back for a second dip if the first one didn’t do the job. Other birds, mostly doves, enjoy the bird bath too, but they always yield to the blue jays who don’t like to wait.
The call of a single blue jay can echo through the air from far away. Add an afternoon rain shower with a little thunder to the call of a blue jay and I can close my eyes and be right back there in Orange. I’m wearing a short-sleeved shirt for the first time in months and the slightly cool breeze brushing the hair on my head tells me Easter is coming.
While the blue jay is my Easter herald, it has no connection to the actual events of Easter. They’re native to North America, so that eliminates them playing a role in anything happening in the Holy Land. The only bird that shows up in the Bible during the week of Easter is the rooster that crowed twice during the trial of Jesus.
Still, that hasn’t kept some traditions from bringing birds into the Easter story. Artists have portrayed St. John and Jesus as children playing with a cardinal with the bright red bird symbolizing the death of Christ. According to one legend, robins have red breasts thanks to a robin that tried to remove a thorn from the crown placed on the head of Jesus at the cross. Another tradition has three birds at the crucifixion: a robin, a finch and a goldfinch. The Swiss apparently associate the cuckoo bird with Easter and spring. Oh, and let’s not forget bright yellow chicks that are sometimes given to children during the holiday.
If I were to try to connect the blue jay to Easter in some theological way, I’d say it is not unlike my faith. It’s mostly out of sight, but it’s never far away. Sometimes I only hear its distinctive voice from a distance, and sometimes it swoops down loudly into the big middle of trouble and takes charge, chasing away my doubts. It’s persistent, pushy, aggressive and courageous in the face of chaos. It’s always there waiting to be called upon when I’m spiritually thirsty — like blue jays when I remember to refill the bird bath.
Even so, for me the blue jay is mostly just imbedded in my memories of Easters from long ago — of formative days spent in a special place where family and faith were always present.