Jays are quite possibly the most widely recognized of our backyard birds. Easily identified by their unique combination of color (blue) and voice (loud), even those who have never paid any particular attention to birds will often know who you are talking about when you mention this name. Here in Marin, the main bird in question is, officially speaking, the California scrub-jay: this is the ubiquitous “blue jay” that is common in both woodlands and neighborhoods, while forested areas are home to the elegantly crested Steller’s jay.

Jays have many admirers, myself included, as do most birds. But they also have detractors, both casual and committed, who in their combined ranks exceed the not-a-fan clubs of any other native bird that I can think of. Why?

Some object to their voice, which is rather loud and harsh. But loudness has its uses: jays often give the most prominent warnings of predators, warnings which the smaller birds can take advantage of. When you’re auditioning fire engine sirens, you don’t look for the quietest and most unobjectionable tone: you want volume, and jays provide it. Anyways, their calls add contrast and spice to life. There’s an old Preston Sturges comedy in which the conductor protagonist encourages a mild-mannered member of the orchestra to a less inhibited cymbal performance: “Be vulgar by all means, but let me hear that brazen laugh!” The world without jays would be an orchestra without cymbals.

But the main charge against jays focuses on their domineering attitude towards other birds. Often, this sentiment springs from a common observation: various small songbirds are chomping away at a feeder, a jay flies in with a raucous squawk, and the small birds scatter. If that’s the problem, there are simple remedies. Use a feeder with an outer cage to exclude large birds. Or stick to offering a nectar solution to hummers, Nyjer to goldfinches, and millet to the doves and sparrows — all foods the jays disdain.

This impulse to protective sympathy increases when people learn that jays do not simply scatter the small birds from feeders when the fancy strikes them, but actively prey on them, especially eggs and nestlings. That has always been the pattern of jay life, an inevitable result of their place in the ladder of bird size. When you’re a chickadee, you might raise your young on a diet of insects. When you’re a jay with hungry mouths to feed, you look for larger prey, and nestling songbirds are the easy springtime protein. Jays are bigger, that’s all.

The other thing to keep in mind here is just how full of dangers the world is: human expectations for infant survival simply do not hold true in the bird world. Rats, squirrels, raccoons, crows, ravens, hawks, storms, heat, starvation, parental mishap and myriad human-caused threats of severed tree limbs, cats, poisons, and collisions with cars and buildings form a challenging gauntlet to reach maturity. Think of the math: a pair of songbirds might lay 30 eggs over three years of adult life. Bird populations are not exploding, because survival is the exception, not the norm. Predation by jays is just one piece of this puzzle.

Finally, there is one more item to consider, which for me is the perennial clincher when it comes to the merits of jays: they plant the oaks. Acorns are too big and bulky to be distributed by wind or most animals: they need someone of a certain size, who ideally will plant them a few inches underground in a diversity of locations. That’s exactly what jays do, storing some 6,000 acorns each in a solid harvest year.

With jays, we have oaks; without them, we do not. To my mind, this alone should be enough to give any detractors pause. And it becomes even more true when you consider the big picture implications: take oaks from these communities and what would you have left? What would happen to the titmice and nuthatches then? In this sense, not only are the depredations of jays upon the eggs and nestlings of small songbirds excusable and limited, but they are actively outweighed by this service, fundamental to the very existence of the oak woodland.

Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato, leads walks and seminars on nature in Marin, and blogs at Nature In Novato. Reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.