Note: This show first aired September 27, 2014.
I have red oaks around my house, which means this time of
year, I have blue jays. I watched them the other day from my desk, looking out
my window at the rain. They hopped and flapped from branch to branch at the top
of the trees I see from my third story vista, searching for acorns, their
preferred food this time of year. Hence the correlation: oaks and jays.
Spending time beneath these branches is a bit of a risk, acorns frequently rain
down, dropped accidentally. Jays hold the acorns in their claws and pound away
at them with their thick beaks, cracking them open to access the nutritious nutmeat
inside. This time of year, it’s likely to be all that they are eating.
There’s a reason we humans think about eating all the time.
In the natural world, in the world we evolved in as animals (the animals we
still are despite our computers and phones and refrigerators), what else is
there to think about except finding food? Food is the constant vocation for
wild animals, the number one job of all consumers is just that, to eat. Without
enough food, there is nothing, no energy to run the metabolism that drives the
fulfillment of genetic destiny. Food first, sex later.
I imagined what that would be like, to wake up in the
morning like a wild animal, each and every morning of every day of your life
thinking about food. Everyday a new day, a fresh opportunity to eat, or starve.
Imagine getting out of bed in the morning in a house with no kitchen. No cupboard,
no fridge, no food stores of any kind. Your day starts with you going outside
to find something to eat. Every day starts that way. Reality TV aside, this is
a marginal existence, an existence that honed us through natural selection oh
so many years ago. An existence we pay no attention to now, unless you are a
neo-aboriginal, experimenting with “rewilding light”, or desperately poor.
It turns out that Blue Jays, though they live the life of
wild creatures everywhere, have a strategy for food scarcity, a strategy to
cushion the pangs of hunger. They cache food, acorns and other mast crops from
the forest. They can move hundreds of acorns a day, thousands a week, hundreds
of thousands during a season. They bury them in small groups in the soil of the
forest floor, and have a retrieval rate, according to one study, of about 30 %.
That leaves about 70% for other animals to eat, or to germinate, dispersed so
widely and nicely from the parent tree. Other studies show that Blue Jays are
real foodies, picking only the healthiest and most viable acorns for caching,
which means in practice, oak trees have come to depend on this noisy bird for
dispersing their seeds. The idea is out there that Blue Jays are at least in
part responsible for the rapid reforestation that occurred after the last of
the glaciers left New England twelve thousand years ago. That’s a mighty job
for a small blue bird. Americans are estimated to waste about 40% of the food
we buy, and our food waste doesn’t feed other animals or grow forests, most of
it rots in land fills (compost piles not withstanding). It’s a statement of how
far out of the system we’ve come.
If I can’t think of the Blue Jays as facing each day with an
empty belly (though in practice, even with food stored away, there are not
guarentees), there are certainly other animals that wake up each morning with a
clean slate. The coyotes I have been hearing around my house every night for
the past two weeks don’t cache food. They spend all their time searching. What
if I lived more like a coyote instead of a blue jay? What if every day that
dawned was a brand new challenge to fill my stomach, as unconnected from the
day before as to the day ahead. Each day an individual exercise in survival,
life a series of these days strung together, one after the other, going on
until I fail.
The blue jays I see this fall I watched fledge in July. Fledging
day dawns with a ruckus coming from those same tree tops outside my 3rd
story window, the young hop and flutter from branch to branch all the while
encouraged by the screeching calls of the adults. I imagine they are saying
“come on come into this world, where your pursuits must be single minded, and
your eyes clear”.
References:
Blue Jay basics from Cornell: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Blue_Jay/lifehistory
Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/469/articles/introduction?__hstc=75100365.3158294d7b302ccb4baa709ab0dcc6f9.1397130536637.1402758359782.1411606172833.6&__hssc=75100365.1.1411606172833&__hsfp=1771447269
Good citations to studies if you are a paid subscriber to
the Birds of North America site
Nice article with a few more details about cache retrieval
rates (presumably from the above studies) http://www.courierpress.com/lifestyle/blue-jays-cashing-in-on-caches-to-survive
Natural History piece from Loyola University: http://www.loyno.edu/lucec/natural-history-writings/blue-jay-acorn-planters
