Bird Notes

Photo by Alexandra Evans

Q & A

Q:How can I quell the invasion of hordes of Blue Jays at my feeder?

A: I have two recommendations. The first would be to rejoice in your hordes of Blue Jays, because they are actually amazing, intelligent, and quite beautiful, socially complex birds (European visitors routinely express jealousy that such a spectacular jay is common in our yards).

But if you do indeed want to get the jays to move out, the best thing is to take the food away for a few days. Blue Jays are dispersing (post-breeding) right now, and their summertime territoriality has broken down. What you are witnessing is the beginning of their caching of food for the winter. (If you watch a jay carefully, you?ll see that it is filling up its throat pouch with seeds or suet and then flying off to cache the food.)

At this time of year, when jays find an unlimited food source, quite a few of them can use it together without worrying about each other. Being creatures of habit, they?ll keep doing it as long as the food is there, and their numbers can build pretty high because jays are extremely astute ?empathic learners? (watching others and imitating successful strategies).

If you take the food away for three to four days, they will go elsewhere to find food to cache (i.e., somebody else?s yard). My prediction is that when you put the food back out you won?t see as many of them return to it (perhaps just your local pair). If you follow this option, I?d be interested to know if it works. You could even log the largest number you see at any one time and plot this through the days of the experiment. Citizen science at its finest!

—John W. Fitzpatrick, director

Gray Jay by Isidor Jeklin/CLO

DID YOU KNOW?

Cool facts from our All About Birds website

Jay adhesives: Gray Jays store food by using sticky saliva to glue small food items into crevices in tree branches above the hight of eventual snow line. This innovation helps Gray Jays inhabit northern boreal forests throughout the winter.

Thinking like thieves: A Western Scrub-Jay can cache up to 6,000 piñon seeds or 5,000 acorns in autumn, but some scrub-jays have also learned to pilfer food that other hays have hidden. Laboratory studies show that pilfering jays are also savvy about how to prevent their own food from being stolen. If they noticed that other jays were observing them hiding food, they later dug it up and hid it again when other weren't watching. In contrast, jays that had never stolen food did not pay attention to whether they were being watched.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu