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Wise Oaks, Clever Jays

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Blue Jay (photo by Linda Petersen).

Blue Jay (photo by Linda Petersen).

“One Blue Jay can cache up to 5,000 acorns in a single autumn season.”

It's another big acorn year, and many oak trees have dropped their acorns relatively early - presumably because they are stressed from the drought, and can’t afford the resources needed to grow their seeds to maturity.

Like many fruit and nut-producing trees, oaks have collectively large crop years (usually about every two to three years), and other years where production is low. It’s rare to have two boom years in a row, however (such as we’ve had in 2019 and 2020).

Oak acorns leaves Pasja 2000 on Pixabay.jpg

These boom and bust cycles are known as “masting”, an adaptive and synchronous behavior that is coordinated among trees in order to improve their collective chances of reproduction. Masting is just one example in a growing body of science that demonstrates how trees can communicate to one another, and across vast distances!

The nuts of our mighty oaks fall heavy and hard when the wind blows, making you jump and think to yourself - "maybe I should be wearing a hard hat out here?!" Meanwhile, small flocks of blue jays (often family groups) are moving through hardwood forests - busily collecting and caching these synchronized seeds.

Blue Jay (photo by Dana Greindl).

Blue Jay (photo by Dana Greindl).

These highly social and intelligent birds can carry five acorns at a time (2 - 3 in a pouch in their throat, one in their mouth, and one more in the tip of the bill). One Blue Jay can cache up to 5,000 acorns in a single autumn season. They will eat the acorns that are infested with protein-rich weevils right away, and cache the rest for leaner times.

Blue Jay (photo by Linda Petersen).

Blue Jay (photo by Linda Petersen).

Like other birds that store food, jays have advanced spatial memory skills and an enlarged hippocampus - the brain's built-in GPS. However, they have several thousand acorns to keep track of and will forget where some of them are. These will become tomorrow's mighty oaks!

I hope you enjoyed this Phenology Note!

Join me in witnessing the seasons of our wild world.

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