Finding the Florida Scrub-Jay

An interview with the author of “Florida Scrub-Jay: Field Notes on a Vanishing Bird”

A hop across the sand, a quick snap of the head toward a scuttling lizard, a flight up into the trees – these are some behaviors of Florida Scrub-Jays that Mark Jerome Walters spends 150 pages documenting while they can still be seen.

Walters is a professional journalist and veterinarian. He is also a professor of Journalism and Digital Communication at the University of South Florida. 

The book offers an engaging, rigorous account of this iconic blue bird’s evolutionary history and its decades-long plight in a rapidly developing state. It also highlights efforts to protect the bird in recent years. 

Walters writes about how development in central and southern Florida counties forces Scrub-Jays into tiny slivers of scrub – short vegetation or smaller forest growth – squashed between highways and golf clubs. Scrub-Jays seeking viable habitats pack into overpopulated protected lands, such as Oscar Scherer State Park, where they fight with each other for limited territory. Scrub-Jays who do not get territory are frequently hunted by predators both wild and domestic. 

According to the IUCN Red List, the Florida-Scrub Jay is “vulnerable” with its population decreasing. Partners in Flight report roughly 7,500 individual Scrub-Jays remaining.

Continued residential, business, and agricultural development is destroying the last refuges of coastal scrub habitat in central and southern Florida counties. The famously friendly bird, who will sometimes land on visitors’ heads, is on the brink of extinction. Advocates regularly call to elevate the Scrub-Jay to state bird status, prompting lawmakers to introduce bills to the Florida Legislature. The Northern Mockingbird currently holds the state bird status.

Walters features the voices of scientists and volunteers on the forefront of Scrub-Jay conservation, supplementing each expert’s data-driven explanations with an emotional connection to the bird. 

Walters adds visual language to help show readers the Florida Scrub-Jay’s world. 

“Still, it was an enchanting few acres right at the beach, covered in a variety of shrubs presided over by native slash pines with conical tops reminiscent of bonsai trees. The sky was incredibly blue that morning, its azure depth intensified by sculpted white clouds on the horizon,” Walters writes. 

Through the use of such imagistic prose, readers who might have overlooked the scrub can learn to see the environment in a new light.

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

Q: What inspired your focus on the Scrub-Jay?

A: I’ve always had an inclination to report on the things that people don’t know a lot about. I was especially fascinated with the Scrub-Jay because it is, or was, among the most common birds in the scrub and in Florida. I found it curious that now, very few people who I asked knew about the Scrub-Jay. Very few people had even heard of it unless they lived near the scrub. So it was really to bring to light the plight of some species that people might never have heard of.

Q: What was the most significant challenge you faced while writing this book? 

A: It was really the book itself in terms of figuring out how to cover so much territory… It was also challenging to figure out where I was going to go. There were a lot of logistical decisions in terms of picking and choosing areas because you can only do so much.

Of course, one of the greatest challenges that turned out to be a major theme of the book, especially in the early part, was even seeing a Scrub-Jay. I was actually shocked to find that it was so difficult to see them in areas where they had once been so common.

In the first part of the book, talking about Brevard County, one reason I began the book with my father’s stories was because he could see Scrub-Jays in that area when I saw almost none. The reader wants to see a Scrub-Jay, well, I couldn’t deliver that, so I kind of went back to my father’s stories to do that.

It was interesting that the greatest challenge of the book kind of became the book. It was the negative space. It’s not about the Scrub-Jay, but it’s about the places where the Scrub-Jay once was. What initially was a challenge turned out to be the heart and soul of the book. Not about the Scrub-Jay itself, but about the missing Scrub-Jay. 

Q: How was the research process for this book?

A: It was also challenging for a few reasons. The Scrub-Jays live in different concentrated areas. The challenge was: How do you write one story that could really very easily fall into four or five stories? I needed a narrative technique. The only way I could think of doing that was to actually give a background theme of traveling from one place to another in search of the Scrub-Jay. That meant a lot of travel. Reporting from the field often means a very low yield in terms of the words that actually end up in the book. You can spend a week in an area and actually only have a paragraph or two that you want to include in the book. 

There’s a tremendous depth that you learn about a subject, so that was time-consuming but it was wonderful to be out in the field. I traveled all over the area where the Scrub-Jay lived, and then I pulled together through the common theme of: They’re all facing a similar plight. That became the storyline of the book. I also, of course, spoke to the people in each of those areas who knew most about the Scrub-Jay in those particular places. 

Q: What do you think that the individual can do to help the remaining Scrub-Jays?

A: It’s always a tough question. What can the individual do with a problem that really is at a very large landscape level or even a global level? Everything we do, even as individuals, can add up to something big… I’m trying to do my part by publicizing it, but part of it is really political.

The great thing about a democracy is that we can all always play at least a small part in the future, and that’s by voting. Voting on our particular initiatives, and that sort of thing because that works. But, it’s hard to appreciate the connection between checking a box on a form and what’s happening to the Scrub-Jay or global climate change, and yet none or very few of us have the individual ability to do something in and of itself that’s going to change the picture, so we all have these little parts to play.

I think joining conservation efforts, writing about these things, telling stories to your kids about them, are kinds of real, but invisible things that if they could become culturally-based as opposed to just let’s say activist-based, then that will begin to move things. We’re already seeing it beginning to move things… It’s individual efforts for those of us who can’t make huge splashes in the world. It adds up and we won’t be around to see the benefits, but at least we can die knowing that we left something in the way of education behind. 

Q: Would it be helpful to make the Florida Scrub-Jay the state bird?

A: It would certainly be helpful to the people who prioritize the Scrub-Jay. To those who are more concerned with the continuing economic development of Florida, it would not be helpful. What would be most helpful for the bird? Certainly, it would be the state bird designation. But, I don’t think that will happen because it’s controversial. It is the lightning rod for the clash, the dilemma between conservationists and developers. 

People will protect anything that they feel their identity depends on. And if people’s identity with the state truly depended on the Scrub-Jay, then there would be actions taken. Naming it in and of itself offers nothing concrete, but the symbolism is absolutely enormous. 

Q: How did you feel when you discovered it was difficult to even find a Scrub-Jay?

A: I had mixed emotions, I mean, I had done research before so I wasn’t totally surprised. But I wanted to write a book with an upbeat tone because my other books weren’t particularly upbeat. And so to begin the book thinking this would be a story of hope and promise quickly dwindled into a story of what has happened to the Scrub-Jay. I have been in this business long enough to witness the decline of so many different species and plants and animals that is kind of the milieu under which I live.

It’s interesting the reactions to the book. I see this as actually having a lot of hope, and you don’t see that until the end, in places like Ocala National Forest where you see so many Scrub-Jays. But I think a lot of people saw the book as kind of a downer, whereas I hoped it would be more of a beacon of hope. But, you can’t appreciate the need for hope unless you see the dark side of it.

Q: What was your favorite thing that you learned about the Scrub-Jay in the process of writing this book?

A: An incredible surprise, and a happy one, was the nature of the scrub itself. The scrub has always been considered, historically, a kind of throw-away land. The Scrub-Jay doesn’t think that but, it’s really an incredible world in and of itself. It’s hot as hell, it can kill you out there, but when you start getting into the intricacies of life there – the bugs, the Scrub-Jay – it’s just an amazing, amazing world that’s managed to thrive in the most intense conditions. My big surprise was seeing and learning that the scrub was not a wasteland but it was a paradise in its own right.