California Scrub-Jay: Planter of Oaks
“Gather ye rosebuds ACORNS while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying…”
With apologies to 17th-century English poet Robert Herrick, it is October in the oak woodlands of central California where I make my home, and we have no rosebuds to gather here. We do have acorns, though, millions upon millions of them.
Those acorns are now falling from the trees. Autumn is an important time of the year for acorn gatherers, winged as well as quadruped. You know the usual suspects: Acorn Woodpeckers, ground squirrels, western gray squirrels, and mule deer. They are all busy looking for acorns.
Sometimes overlooked in this endeavor are California Scrub-Jays. They, too, are actively harvesting acorns. What they don’t eat right away, they bury in the ground for winter-time consumption when insects and fruit are less plentiful. Researchers have demonstrated that a single scrub-jay may cache hundreds, if not thousands, of acorns over the course of a year. Incredibly, they can even remember the location of up to 200 different caches, weeks, even months later. For me, that remarkable statistic is grounds for wonder. In comparison, I can’t even remember where I put my car keys an hour ago.
California Scrub-jay with acorn in beak
Acorns not consumed by deer, squirrels, woodpeckers, or the scrub-jays themselves, may sprout and become the next generation of oaks in our woodlands. It happens every year on my property. Some of those seedlings emerge from the ground far from the canopy of a mother-tree. For that, I thank my neighborly scrub-jays. How else might I explain a Blue Oak growing shoulder to shoulder next to an Inland Valley Oak? Or how a seedling sprouts below the eves of my house?
To witness a feat of great dexterity, watch a California Scrub-Jay consume an acorn. The jay has a sturdy, slightly hooked bill specifically adapted for gripping and then opening the hard shell. While holding the acorn down on a branch with its toes, the jay will hammer the nut with its lower mandible, pry the shell open, and then pick the meat out. That is an impressive performance with limited tools. I, for one, can’t figure out how to use a nutcracker without spilling shell and nut pieces everywhere.
California Scrub-jay opening acorn
I find scrub-jays fascinating to watch. Some people call them “bully birds,” but I think of them as being the drill sergeants of the avian world. With their legs spread apart, their posture is bold and assertive. They move with purpose and determination, whether on the ground, in the trees, or in the air. They swoop down to the head of the line at your seed feeder, screeching a warning to other birds to clear out. And, yes, just like a drill sergeant, they do make a lot of noise.
California Scrub-jay
Scrub-jay in flight
It's not just smaller birds that scrub-jays muscle out of the way. A Red-tailed Hawk that hangs out in a tree along my walking path is occasionally subjected to the wrath of a scrub-jay who has his beak out of joint regarding the presence of a raptor in the neighborhood. That scrub-jay will dive-bomb the much larger bird, who just ducks, again and again, until it eventually departs. Does the jay, who has memory of past transgressions, have a beef with that hawk?
California Scrub-jay mobbing a Red-tailed Hawk
One afternoon, during the course of a hilarious food fight between two different species, I watched a scrub-jay stand face to face with a much larger rabbit. The source of the altercation was bird feed spread out on the ground in my wife’s backyard labyrinth. A sudden and surprise poke on the nose from the jay sent that rabbit into the air. Upon returning to terra firma, and refusing to retreat, the rabbit got poked not once, but two more times in rapid succession. Now, that is what I call one dumb bunny, if I ever saw one.
California Scrub-jay and rabbit face off
California Scrub-jay pecks rabbit on nose
“It takes a thief to catch a thief,” the saying goes. If you observe scrub-jays for a while, you might conclude the proverb applies to them, and it would not be your imagination that leads you to that conclusion. They remember past experiences, and plan for the future. Scrub-jays even have the surprising ability to understand and predict the behavior of other birds, a mental process called “theory of mind.”
From my patio overlook, I follow the scrub-jays in the surrounding oak trees as well as on the ground below, and watch this behavior play out. An individual scrub-jay who, in the past, has pilfered some other jay’s stores, will go about its acorn caching with purposeful planning. If it believes that a nearby jay is watching with the intent to steal the just-buried acorn, it might put a rock in the ground instead, and fly off with the acorn. Alternatively, if it does put the acorn in the ground, the jay will come back later to cache the food elsewhere, when the coast is clear.
Whenever I drive southwest along Highway 41 from the oak woodland foothills of the Sierra, near Yosemite National Park, across the vast farmland of California’s central valley, up over the coast ranges, through the city of El Paso de Robles (Pass of the Oaks) on to Morro Bay, Pismo Beach, or Cambria for oceanside birding activity, I marvel at what I see across the rolling hills along my way: from creek beds deep in the arroyos, on up to the crest of the rolling hills, there are mighty oak trees standing proud.
Did acorns roll down the dry hillsides to the watershed in the valleys, or did those acorns climb up the hills for a view of the horizon? That is a fanciful question I like to ponder as I drive this bucolic scenery. I then visualize those acorns dispersed in odd places around my property, and I thank my noisy neighbor, the California Scrub-Jay, planter of oaks.
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