Incoming krawk-kraw-krawk calls early one morning, as a flock of 40 pinyon jays descended on our feeders. These jays are very social, traveling in flocks of 50 to more than 500. When on the move, they fly close together, giving harsh nasal calls. They love our piñon-juniper woodlands in Lamy.
The nuts of the pinyon are their staple. They can hold up to 50 piñon nuts in their expandable esophagus while foraging.
They certainly supplement their diet with whatever bird food we place on our feeders — sunflower, peanuts, millet, suet and berries. They also eat insects of various types, sometimes catching them with their feet.
The pinyon jay is a bluish-gray colored bird with deeper head coloring and whitish throat with black bill legs and feet. Unlike other jays, the pinyon jay has no feathers at the base of the bill. This allows it to search deep into pinecones for seeds without soiling its feathers with sticky pine sap.
Like most jays, the pinyon jays store hidden caches of food, but unlike other jays, both members of the mated pair work together to hide food items and thus, both of them know the location of their cache.
In years when pine cone crops fail, pinyon jays will engage in irruptive migration, leaving their permanent home territories and moving great distances in search of food.
A single jay can cache more than 20,000 seeds in a single season and travel up to 7 miles to cache seeds for later use. Seeds are cached both on and off the ground. Several seeds are placed in each cache.
Pinyon jays nest in colonies, very close together with one to three nests in a tree. They breed mostly in late winter, with the adults feeding largely on stored food. They may nest again in late summer if pinyon pines produce a large crop of nuts.
The nest sites are usually 3 to 20 feet above the ground in juniper or pinyon. Nests are built by both sexes with a foundation of twigs and an inner cup comprised of shredded bark, grass, pine needles and animal hair.
Females typically incubate three to five eggs. During incubation, males leave the females and form their own feeding flocks. The females are fed pinyon nuts by their mates once every hour on average. Eggs are typically incubated for 17 days before hatching.
To protect fledglings from the cold, females will remain on the nests continuously. Females and young are fed regurgitated pine nuts. The young jays fledge approximately three weeks after hatching. After leaving the nest the young learn to feed themselves a diet of mainly insects, with piñon nuts being eaten as a reserve food.
Predation from ravens, squirrels and hawks can be high for pinyon jays, but flocking, colonial nesting and mobbing may deter predators.
Several members of the flock act as sentinels, positioned at a high vantage point, on the lookout for an intruder while the flock is feeding. If an intruder is spotted, a warning call goes out, feeding ceases and the flock hides in the trees.
It’s late afternoon and our flock of pinyon jays will soon be returning for their daily, afternoon dinner. I can hear them in the distance now. Our feeding stations will soon be laid bare.
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December 02, 2021 at 01:30PM
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