Hi everyone, I saw something interesting today involving Eurasian jays in Germany and I’m trying to understand the meaning of a very specific call pattern.

I was following one jay that was busy caching food/ retrieving its cache on a rooftop. Suddenly, from a different direction, another jay started giving a repeated call that sounded (to me) like this: two harsh shrieks close together, a short pause, then one more shriek. The bird repeated this exact three-shriek sequence over and over.

The caching jay immediately abandoned what it was doing and flew to a nearby tree (with something in its beak, which it later dropped). After a brief moment, it flew toward the calling jay. I followed that caching jay and ended up under the tree with the two jays were perched together at its top. There were also three magpies already sitting in the same tree (or a tree that was right next the "jay tree") when I arrived. The jays weren’t interacting with the magpies at all — no aggression, no chasing, everyone just perched calmly. So it didn’t seem like the call was directed at the magpies.

This felt a lot like some kind of alert or recruitment call, maybe signaling a potential predator or disturbance. Unfortunately, I recorded it using the Merlin app and only afterward remembered that Merlin no longer saves recordings by default unless you manually save them… so the recording is gone.

So I’m hoping for some input:

(1) Does anyone have recordings of this kind of repeated shriek pattern in Eurasian jays, or know of good online examples? I’d love to compare. (2) Do jay alarm/warning calls indicate which species is being warned about (like they do in some other corvids), or is this more of a general “something’s up” alert?

Any insight would be really appreciated — Eurasian jays are so vocal and nuanced that I feel like there must be some meaning behind this specific pattern.