A Bag of Cache

In this month’s issue of Bird Watcher’s Digest, there’s a great article by Marie Read about birds that cache seeds in autumn and how it benefits reforestation. What I found particularly fascinating was her information about blue jays. She explains that Virginia biologists did a study in the 1980s and found that 50 blue jays collected and cached 150,000 acorns in just 28 days. I looked up more details from the study, and that stash of acorns translated to 58% percent of the nut crop from 11 pin oaks!

Blue jays have an expandable throat pouch that allows them to carry several acorns (or many smaller nuts or seeds) at a time. I have always wondered why when they visit my feeder, blue jays throw back their heads and appear to swallow nuts whole. In fact what they are doing is filling up their pouch and flying off to hide or bury the nuts for the winter.

I watched a blue jay burying some peanuts in my lawn the other day. He flew from the feeder to one of my raised beds and unloaded his pouch. Then he took one peanut, jumped down into the grass and quickly pounded it into the ground with his beak. When he was finished, he grabbed the nearest oak leaf and haphazardly flung it in the direction of the hole. Then he flew back to the peanut pile and started over again.

The blue jay wasn’t nearly as precise or creative as the chickadee and nuthatch have been in caching seeds in my yard, but I have to give him points for the comical, leaf-flinging finish!

In the photo above, you can see his expanding throat pouch and dirty beak from hammering nuts into the soil.