Hybrid bird near San Antonio is likely result of climate change
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The rare hybrid bird found in a San Antonio suburb. Photos: Courtesy of Brian Stokes/University of Texas at Austin
The offspring of a green jay and a blue jay, recently discovered in a suburb northeast of San Antonio, may be among the first examples of two different bird species mating due to climate change.
Why it matters: Shifting weather patterns appear to have expanded the habitats of the two species, University of Texas at Austin researchers announced.
Zoom in: The green jay is a tropical bird found across Central America, whose range in the 1950s just barely extended north of Mexico into South Texas. Blue jays, which live across the eastern U.S., had a range about as far west as Houston.
- They almost never came into contact with each other, researchers said.
- But since then, their ranges have met in the middle around San Antonio, as green jays traveled north and blue jays moved west.
What they're saying: "We think it's the first observed vertebrate that's hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change," Brian Stokes, a doctoral candidate at UT studying green jays in Texas, said in a statement.
How it works: Stokes regularly monitors social media for birding sights. Upon seeing a post from a woman near San Antonio of the odd-looking bird, he got in touch, and the woman invited Stokes to see the bird up close.
- He was able to catch the bird to take a blood sample and mark its leg to help find it in the future. Stokes then released it.
Context: Stokes and his faculty adviser, Tim Keitt, have now published an analysis in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
- The bird, a male, is similar to a hybrid bird that researchers created in the 1970s by crossing a green and blue jay in captivity. That bird was preserved through taxidermy and is held by the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.
The bottom line: "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," Stokes said.
- "And it's probably possible in a lot of species that 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."