A woodland bird with a conspicuous white rump in flight. In Britain it is found widely except in northern Scotland.
Blue wing feathers stand out against a brownish body. The white rump is another useful feature when it flies away.
Eurasian Jays stored acorns in tree cavities as well as among leaves and in soil. In a three-week study in November 2020 at a managed forest in western Poland, researchers fitted pedunculate-oak and northern-red-oak acorns with radio transmitters and tracked them. Of 116 acorns carried away by jays, 14 were eaten and 102 were stored.
Most stored acorns were in leaf litter or topsoil. Five were found in tree cavities 1–7 m above the ground. The openings had been plugged with moss; four acorns were in black locusts and one in a rotten black alder stem.
The authors proposed that tree cavities might reduce the risk of rodents taking stored acorns and described this as a hypothesis for future study. Acorns stored in tree cavities cannot germinate, so these five caches could not produce oak seedlings.
IUCN Red List · Least Concern (LC) · Global
The 2025 IUCN Red List assessment classifies the Eurasian Jay as Least Concern (LC) globally. It estimates 24.0–46.2 million mature individuals and describes the population trend as stable.