Blue Jays in my area have started mimicking bald eagles.

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Bald eagles contrary to movies(apparently eagles do not screech and usually for movies when it shows an eagle the use a red tail hawk noise for it). In real life though bald eagles just sound like really loud sea-gulls, like they have a simular sound but the eagle version is much louder than a sea gull. But whatever either way I have seen a few bald eagles around here and now seems like the blue jays have seen them enough they are also mimicking the sound.


Ha ha makes it confusing because I keep trying to look around for if there is any kind of eagle or hawk in the vicinity but the last couple days it was super hot out when I was going home from work so didn't want to stop too long to observe the jays that were making eagle calls. But yeah it was suspiciously coming from various trees next to each other with no eagle in sight so for sure just blue jays mimicking the call. They could have been trying to scare away a hawk cause hawks will land on lower branches closer to prey where it seems like eagles just want the highest vantage point they can get.

But yeah lately more and more blue jays keep seeming to imitate the bald eagle noise, along with the red tail hawk noise...like they can imitate both pretty good. Idk I just don't recall them doing the bald eagle in the past couple of years but now we have also seen bald eagles here so it's not improbable that the blue jays have also noticed and learned how to mimick their sound. Almost sounds like their new favorite, is to make eagle sounds at other critters and birds are afraid of so they get first pick of bird feeder stuff people leave out for birds. I just keep it simple and put almonds out for the blue jays which they seem to like.

Wow. Thats a remarkable observation. Never heard of that behavior before. But I believe it. Mockingbirds are so called because they immitate other bird calls. But jays (cousins of crows) are quite crafty and might well immitate the sound of eagles in order to scare off other birds at the bird feeder, or scare away predators attacking thier nests.

I just wikied blue jays. And that is a thing theyre known to do ...imitate hawks (they said both to "see if hawks are around", and to scare away "other birds", and probably squirrels too).

Which kind of blue jays do you have? There is the eastern kind (like the Toronto baseball team uses as its mascot)which have white and blue around the face, and there is the western kind with the black head (aka the stellar's jay). Which kind do you have? Both have perky top notches. Maybe you have both kinds.

We have starlings that do that.
When I was younger and we lived in a coastal village back in the early '80's a row of terraced houses across the road were having their slate roofs replaced with tiles, as back then it was the latest fashion to do so with houses. (Our house, being an earlier house (Origionally thatched) had lovely light blue Pembrokeshire slates, but the other houses had the purple "Dinorwic" (From North Wales) slates).
Now the roofing guys had for weeks been working on these roofs, so for weeks we heard the tap-tap banging in of nails.
But this tap-tapping carried on for months, before we realized it was the starlings that were perfectly copying the sound. (Our house was on a bank higher than the street below and our land behind was higher, so it puzzled us whose roof they were doing as no roofers could be seen!)
Then around the mid 1980's came the craze for having car alarms fitted to cars and one can imagine the sound when these starlings got to hear them and copy them! Haha! It was audiable chaos! Hahaha!
Funny thing about those early car alarms when back street traders were fitting them for a small extra fee, was that my first Volvo purchased secondhand had had one fitted, and right in the middle of the console between the two footwells (So it was highly visible) was a large toggle switch surrounded by its metallic sign printed in red "ALARM ON... OFF" What is the point of that? Thief breaks in and just switches the alarm off! I moved the switch to a more hidden location.

Hmmm...
We have starlings in the eastern US, but they are not known for mimicking sounds here Afaik. Mockingbirds are so called because they imitate other bird calls.

Fun fact...starlings are native to Britain, but not to the US. But we now have them all over (from sea to shining sea) but they were introduced only in 1890. Less than 150 years ago. A group of people had a ceremony and released about 100 imported British starlings in central park in New York. Within decades they had multiplied and spread as far south as the gulf coast and as far west as the Mississippi and beyond! And are now often considered to be a pest.

And the reason they introduced the starling species to America?

Take a WILD guess.

They were a literary club who felt that it was their duty to introduce into America "all of the birds mentioned in the works of Shakespeare".
Shakespeare mentions starlings. So we gotta have them here.

Crazy as that sounds they were not any more misguided than the more "practical minded" folks who did things like ...introduce cane toads to Australia. The big poisonous toads were supposed to eat a bug that attacks the sugarcane crop, but they multiplied, took over, and ate everything ...except the bugs that attack sugar cane. Native wildlife was devastated but the cane beetles were largely unscathed.

But I digress.

Sounds like starlings back home in Britain have some talents ours dont have (Britain's Got Talent).

But even they dont hold a candle to the lyre bird of New Guinea.


https://youtu.be/AwxvjrbEkTg

Clever blue jays! I feel certain that magpies sometimes use their distress call to get rid of competition over food. But I have not heard them imitate another bird...yet. I knew about the eagle, so strange that they do that in movies. They also often use the wrong corvid sounds at the wrong location. Like they use carrion crow or hooded crows in American movies, or American crows in British movies. I have even heard rooks in The sinner. I don't know if that was a mistake or someone that really likes British detective series...

Lots of bald eagles around here, see them at the beach nearly every time I go, or sitting in trees alongside roads/highways etc. Can't recall ever hearing one tbh. They're always just silently watching or flying around in circles hunting or whatever - not making noise Ever that I can recall.

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No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

So bit of an update, Today I had one right outside my back patio making the bald eagle call, I got a video of the sound but the blue jay is not visible in it.

Then I put almonds out on the patio railing, which the blue jay came to get but made the eagle sound a couple more times before grabbing the almonds and flying off, of course that time didn't think to record it, because I didn't think it would make the eagle call while coming over to get the almonds. So totally missed an awesome video opportunity...but at least I got to see it I suppose. Maybe I will get another chance to get a good video