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“It seems to me that a national symbol should be something that most of the people in the nation have some familiarity with, like, duh, the loon,” Brunton said. “The loon is a symbol of the North. It has a spectacular voice. It is one of the great sounds of wilderness.”

The stance of Dan Strickland, a world authority on gray jays after nearly 50 years of study, is clear. Even his license plate reads GRAY JAY.

Gray jays might be “fluffy and friendly” and known for landing on a hand for a snack, but how they survive the long winter and raise a clutch of eggs into fledglings while many of their feathered friends are still in South America is pretty amazing.

They coat food with sticky saliva then stash it under bark on trees or tufts of lichen, kept fresh by the cold but safely above the snow. Then they appear to find it again by memory.

He concedes most people won’t have seen a gray jay but hopes that could change.

“They do not occur in downtown Ottawa or Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, but they’re not far away,” he said, pointing to nearby destinations like Algonquin Park, where he served as chief naturalist, or just across the Ottawa River.

“They’re out there.”

Staff at Canadian Geographic quickly landed on the gray jay, said editor Aaron Kylie. They didn’t want to “steal” a provincial bird and, like the choice of the Canadian flag, wanted to go with something completely new.

“Canadian Geographic is sort of unilaterally declaring a national bird,” he said, conceding it’s a “cheeky” move in tune with magazine traditions like Time’s Person of the Year.

“Now Canadians have to take it upon themselves if they think it’s a good idea,” he said, calling it a simple way to recognize what birds and birding mean to Canadians while symbolizing our care and passion for the environment.

“People can call it up (their MP), wish them a happy holidays and say I’d like a gift back and that would be a national bird.”

Listen to the gray jay here: