Time to Eat

My peripheral vision caught a streak of blue shoot by outside the pantry window. The cerulean shard swooped from the treetops through the morning sunlight and pulled up to a quick stop at the bird feeder. A blue jay. With coffee cup in hand, I rose from the small rocker in front of the kitchen wood fire to better observe the outside action on this below-zero morning.
This advance bird initiated a cascade of jays pouring in to the feeder. In seconds, I was watching a feeding frenzy. The cold doesn’t stop them. It’s just another day of finding calories to feed their inner fires.
They are jostling like shoppers on Black Friday, kicking and brushing sunflower seeds to the ground. The frenetic feeding helps the more demure cardinals who prefer to feed on the spilled seed on the ground. Squirrels and rabbits also enjoy the fallen spoils.
The jays have just spent the long night roosting in the black cold. I don’t know for sure where this flock roosts but I have my ideas when I think of thickets of red cedars or windbreaks of pines and spruce within a half mile of our house. And I wonder if the elder jays tell tales, like I do, of when winters were colder and had heaps of snow?
In the background of my bird feeder, I can see a jay disappear into the cavernous rib cage of the butchered deer carcass that I hung up in a bur oak back in November. Jays, chickadees, woodpeckers and even more shy crows have picked the entire skeleton nearly clean.
Winter flocks of blue jays are assemblages of all ages. Together, they are more likely to survive. More birds mean more eyes looking for food and watching for predators, like a Coopers hawk. Jays will not tolerate this kind of chumminess in the spring.
Some jays snatch seeds and in one motion angle their beaks skyward as if they were drinking them. Through the steam of my coffee, I could watch their throats swell with the baggage of seeds.
Like their Corvid cousins, the crow and the Clark’s Nutcracker, blue jays have an expandable gular pouch for storing food like seeds and acorns in their throat.
I watched one jay pick at least a dozen sunflower seeds before flying off with its treasures. When acorns are available they can easily carry five acorns at once; two or three in the pouch, one in the back of their mouth and one in their beak.
The jay then hurries away to eat in quiet and to stash seeds in different hiding places for future eating. Corvids are known for their great memories so food storage is a good strategy.
Another means for surviving a cold and snowy winter is to migrate to more southerly regions. Based solely on my own observations, this winter seems to be a bumper blue jay winter. I don’t recall seeing such flocks lingering during a Minnesota January.
Data from bird banding records from across North America show that survival rates are higher for those blue jays that do not migrate. I’m not surprised. Migration is a dangerous business and most migratory birds born last spring do not live to be a year old.
As I watched, I tried to pick out physical differences. At this time of the year, even those jays born last spring resemble adults. Try as I might there is no way to distinguish female from male at this time of the year.
As a former bird bander, if I captured a spring blue jay in the finely meshed nets, I would blow on its belly to ascertain if their was a brood patch, indicating a female, or cloacal protuberance found on the breeding season male.
Only the female jay incubates the eggs. The brood patch is a featherless area of skin on the belly where her blood warmed skin comes in direct contact with the eggs.
The breeding male’s seminal vesicles enlarge, creating a bulge at his cloacal (genital) opening.
The sun has just set, leaving an apricot sky. It’s dead still and -11°F. A trio of shy cardinals have the feeder to themselves. And somewhere sated jays are settling themselves into a clump of limbs for the night.
I lower the quilted window shades and step out to the wood box in the porch. Time to feed more oak chunks into the insatiable stoves and start plundering the fridge for my daily caloric intake.
