The blue jays always seem to be going somewhere. But where that is, no one knows, exactly.

They swoop in from nowhere in squalls of five or 10 or more and take up positions like commandos in the fir trees, shouting warnings and orders the whole time.

Then, one after another, they raid the bird feeder outside the kitchen window. The homebodies who think they own the feeder, mostly chickadees and nuthatches, keep their distance while the big, blue, crested rangers knock seeds onto the deck and hop down to inspect their work, striding around and twisting their heads up, down and sideways like robots, watching for the cat who they know must be nearby.

After a while they disappear into the woods. They often seem to head west, though this is probably just a quirk of our local topography. If so, maybe there’s a path through here, like an airborne deer trail. It’s hard to tell if any stay in the area, like their cousins the crows who stake out a territory and settle into it. In our yard at least, wave after blue wave seem to just forage on in parts unknown. All winter long the blue jays are coming, again and again, but studies show some of them migrate too. No one knows which ones or why.

It is known that blue jays are omnivorous. They eat insects, the occasional mouse or frog, and rarely even an egg, though their reputation as nest raiders is mainly unwarranted. At least three-quarters of their food is fruits and nuts, especially acorns, which they bury deep against the frost for later. Fifty Midwestern blue jays were surveilled one autumn caching 150,000 acorns in 28 days.

They appear to have excellent memories for where they bury individual nuts, and in another study they seemed outright crafty about it: Their behavior was so erratic that the scientists got the feeling the blue jays knew they were being watched and deliberately scrambled their work patterns.

So much for the phrase “dumb animal.” The blue jays are tricksters who know what they’re doing, and also what they’re talking about. Their raucous screech means “Fear! Foes!” in just one of their dialects. They also make a low whistling sound, and a noise that’s been described as a growl, though I’ve never noticed it. They’re like living panpipes, echoing sounds heard in these woods long before people wandered through. I’ve heard them whine almost like a catbird. And sometimes they whimper like a red-shouldered hawk.

A blue jay on the wing can’t be mistaken for a hawk, though. Blue jays fly like overloaded freight trains. They seem to flap 10 times to get the same thrust a hawk would get in two smooth strokes. Maybe some of them give up on the idea of migrating because flying is more work than foraging.

I wonder where they’re going. In American Indian stories they sometimes fly up to the moon and take part in high-level celestial shenanigans, often acting as pathfinder or figuring out how to survive a run of bad luck. This seems plausible to me. The blue jays seem to understand the sky trails and wherever between here, there and back again they lead to, even though we have no idea.