[EBB Sightings] acorns and jays

Here's a link to Joseph Grinnell's classic article "Up-hill Planters", about scrub-jays as acorn dispersers.

http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Condor/files/issues/v038n02/p0080-p0082.pdf


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Phila Rogers [mailto:philajane6 at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Thursday, October 4, 2007 10:37 PM
> To: 'audubon mt.diablo'
> Subject: [EBB Sightings] acorns and jays
> 
>   
> 
> Dear Birders:
> 
> Bob Battigan mentions in his sighting today that every Scrub Jay was
> carrying an acorn.  My large live oak has produced a prodigious crop of
> acorns this year inducing a frenzy among the local Scrub Jay
> population.
> At first I thought the jays might be mobbing a raptor, but instead they
> were harvesting acorns while warning off all contenders.  The racket
> has been incessant.  And at night raccoons rumble across the roof under
> an overhanging limb, sometimes dropping onto the roof bringing me
> upright.
> 
> The local Steller's Jays who hang out in the conifers across the street
> don't seem to participate in this annual orgy.
> 
> I've read fascinating articles about the symbiotic relationship in the
> High Sierra between the white-barked pines and the harvesters of their
> nuts -- the Clark's Nutcracker.  They have effectively spread the pines
> across the mountain slopes while providing themselves with storehouses
> of nutritious food for the the winter, exhibiting a remarkable memory
> for where they buried their caches.
> 
> I'm not sure about our local jays.  In this land of plenty, winter
> survival doesn't require the same level of recall. 
> 
> My oak, brought as a seedling from the Monterey Peninsula 50 years ago
> is the progenitor of oaks big and small on my hill thanks to the Shrub
> Jays with some help from the fox squirrels.  If it weren't for the
> planted exotics, this grassy hillside would now be an oak savanna. 
> What a lovely thought!  
> 
> Phila Rogers
> 
> 
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