By Denny Olson
Continuing my favorite “bet you didn’t know” stories:
I’ve often been asked which is my favorite bird? I usually hesitate to answer because there are so many stories about hundreds of species that are mind-bogglingly incredible. But my fallback, if I’m pressed to answer, is a bird with which I have a personal relationship. It’s not an exclusive relationship by any means, because of the curious, bold and gregarious nature of this bird. Half of you probably know who I’m talking about already, and for those of you who don’t, it’s the Canada Jay (CAJA).
Relationships aside, CAJA’s have incredible natural history. They are North American Boreal, their ranges dipping below the Canadian Border in a few places like the Northern Rockies. They breed in February, lay eggs in early March and mom and kids are often buried under late snowstorms on the nest. The young are a beautiful dark charcoal until their first molt. For most of the summer and fall, the jays are foraging in a half-square-mile area, coating an eclectic mix of food items in glue-like saliva and pasting them in hiding spots on trunks and branches of trees. They have been known to cache a thousand items per day and perhaps 100,000 per year! Perhaps they have a formulaic approach to caching, but that still seems to be a lot to remember. (I’m a wanna-be “bird-brain”. You?) There’s an untested hypothesis, based on casual observations, that posits they put the food items just above the coming maximum snow level for that winter. If true, that is a level of clairvoyance only 17 million years of evolution could produce, and a mystery to me. We “smart” species have been around for one-fiftieth of that time.
The other thing the biologist in me appreciates is their chick-rearing strategy. For example, if three chicks are raised to fledging time, the most aggressive chick (some say the “whiniest”) will drive out the other two – sometimes with the assistance or at least neutrality of mom and dad. That fledgling will be accepted as a third member of the family throughout the summer, fall and winter. But there is a tradeoff. They travel as a threesome into the next spring’s hatch of eggs. But now, there will be three adults feeding chicks, which is a big advantage for their survival. Eventually, the debt has been paid and the yearling is driven out by the original adults.
Meanwhile, what happens to those poor little fledglings that were driven out last year? They are corvids, remember? Smarty pants. They go on a pilgrimage until they find an unsuccessful nesting pair of Canada Jays and whine at them until they get adopted! So, they travel as a threesome through the summer and fall even though they are not blood-related. The genius here is that the unsuccessful nesters actively help to pass along the genes of the successful nesters. To an evolutionary biologist, that is a jaw-dropping strategy for species survival reminiscent of eugenics!
On interpretive hikes, when we spot a CAJA, I like to stop my groups and say, “Wait for the other two.” I get quizzical looks as the other two nearly always show up. Then I must explain. Once,
a fourth jay showed up and my groups started to rib me about “guide talk”. I held up one finger and said, “Just wait”. Two more soon showed up, accompanying the fourth jay – a multiple of (ahem) three.
But genius aside, Canada Jays are my favorite because of our relationship. I can’t count the times when on a Canadian canoe trip, they have shown up like maid service and cleaned up the campsite of bits of spilled food I hadn’t noticed. When I’ve been in the middle of dressing out a freshly killed elk or deer, they often show up in minutes, cheering me up for the packing out grunt work ahead. I’ve been known to hold up a bit of fat between my index finger and thumb and they land on another finger and snatch their reward for cheering me up.
The Cree call them “Wiskicalkek”, which has been Anglicized to “Whiskey Jack”. It means a spirit that has come to cheer us up. We neo-Eurasians call them “camp robbers”, in the spirit of our illusions of ownership – a concept foreign to many Indigenous peoples without that illusion. I like to think of them as “camp neighbors”.