Do you have a lucky charm or amulet which you carry around with you all the time? In the case of men, changing it from one suit to the other as you go? Women similarly from bag to bag? You don't have to be too credulous or superstitious. It may be a present from someone no longer with us, a sentimental memoir. It often is something that is a pleasure to handle, a smallish stone which you rub reflectively from time to time. A great favourite is amber, which seems to be easily available in Dublin just now. It warms to the hand, and in its main European home, the Baltic, is widely used for female decoration. There is one rather recondite treasure which, on the Continent, is worn on the band of men's hats, but often is treasured as that lucky charm. It is the striking, small feathers from the front of the wing of a jay.
In the case of the one to hand, carefully guarded in a thick see-through plastic covering, a brilliant sky-blue, alternating with black. The whole is not more than two inches long. But look at a good photograph or painting of a jay and you will see and appreciate. This one was found by a woman in Switzerland who regularly has a jay come to her bird table. You would envy her if you feel frustrated to read and hear regularly such observations as that "the sharp piercing call nails you to the spot". This is from a nature-note in a Swiss paper. The writer tells us that the blue eye of this bird looks mockingly at you from the oak tree, the handsomest of all the crow family. The plumage he describes as brown to rosy with a little bluish crest on his head and blue cuffs on his wings. The writer, Jean-Jacques Marteau, is a regular columnist with the paper Tribune de Geneva. He tells us that the bird is most useful to forestry in that it plants thousands of oaks every year. A study in Hesse in Germany, he writes, shows that the jays, by hiding acorns in the soil for winter consumption, have in fact, planted oaks by the thousand. In pine woods, mark you. Germans have long classified the jay as one of the useful birds.
We are told that the jay is seldom seen outside woods - broadleaf or coniferous. How many times has this writer gone into woods, both coniferous and broadleaf in search of the jay and found, maybe, to disgust, grey squirrels. Yet one day a jay of a particularly rosy hue landed on his own lawn. Hope springs eternal. Its colour pattern makes the pheasant look almost vulgar. Lovely bird. Not many about. A good-luck bird. Y