This posting is a bit of an experiment.

The magazine Science News has been around for about a century or so, with excellent science stories, short and long, on every field of science. I’ve subscribed to it for 30 or 40 years, yet rarely posted anything from it onto the SMBAS blog because there articles are nearly always behind a paywall. However they recently posted links to every one of their issues all the way back to 1921, and it looks as if anyone can go in and read at least a few articles without hitting a paywall or signing up for anything.

So I’m giving you a link to a particular issue (December 2025) in their archive.
Scroll down a little bit until you see the article “Meet the ‘grue jay,’ a rare hybrid songbird” and click on that.

If you have any problems with paywalls or having to sign up or giving them an email address, please let met know. I don’t want to bother posting links to articles that can’t be accessed freely and easily by anyone reading our blog. After you read this article, poke around some more and see if you can access other interesting articles in this issue, or in other issues in their general archive.

Even if you don’t care about what exactly a Grue Jay is, please follow the link and report your results back to me in the comments. I will be grateful for a long time (not necessarily eternally).

[Posted by Chuck Almdale]