It’s that time of year again, when the blue jays can drive bird-feeding enthusiasts to distraction. I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but at our house, the blue jay population seems to be doing just fine— and they have my morning schedule down to the minute.

My first chore every morning is to fill the feeders, and this time of year I’m usually doing so in the dark, or very early light. Not that it seems to matter to the jays, who invariably pounce on my offerings the moment I turn my back from the feeders.

It’s not that they’re starving, mind you, it’s just instinct that drives a blue jay’s gluttony come October. Many birds hoard food in the fall, as a hedge against the lean times of winter, but jays are among the most aggressive hoarders in the bird world. They even have adaptations that allow them to carry more food than most birds. A special pouch in their throat can expand to hold as many as five acorns, but around our house it’s usually pound after pound of expensive sunflower seeds that quickly get carted away. They’ll stuff their pouch until their throats puff out like a Wagnerian soprano before flying off to unload their spoils in a hole or crack in a tree, or some other supposedly safe location. Back in our college days, when Jodi and I spent a year in Eugene, Ore., the scrub jays had learned to hide their sunflower seeds under the shingles on our neighbors’ roofs. By early spring, our neighbors had sunflowers growing up there!

Gray jays, of course, are known for excreting a sticky, glue-like saliva, which they use to attach bits of saved food to the undersides of branches.

Food hoarding is a good survival strategy, since it allows birds to take advantage of the autumn’s harvest of seeds and nuts to get them through the winter. Humans, of course, are perhaps the most effective hoarders of all, which is one reason we’ve been so successful as a species.

The hoarding strategy of jays may well be responsible for another trait they share with humans, relatively high intelligence. Jays are members of a larger family of birds, known as the Corvids, which includes jays, magpies, crows, and ravens. As a family, they are often considered among the most intelligent of birds, and some scientists believe that the memory requirements of retrieving large amounts of hoarded food may have led to the development of larger and more developed brains in this family of birds.

While I give the blue jays credit for smarts, that doesn’t make their almost frantic activity at the feeders this time of year any easier to take. There are some strategies, however, that I’ve found effective, which can at least keep the cost of filling the winter larders of close to two-dozen blue jays a bit more reasonable. For one thing, I’ve found that jays love cracked corn almost as much as sunflower seeds— and it’s a lot cheaper. So this time of year, I buy cracked corn in 50-pound bags and generally fill most of my feeders with a mix of roughly two-thirds corn and one-third sunflower seeds.

I also scatter corn on the ground, which keeps the jays busy and away from the feeders, at least for a little while. I also found an orb-shaped feeder that’s made of a wire mesh that is designed to hold sunflower seeds. I hang it right near the window and it’s the one feeder that the jays can’t get into. I fill it with pure sunflower seeds every morning and it’s the go-to feeder for the chickadees, nuthatches and other smaller birds that can’t seem to get near the other feeders because of the piggish jays. That way, most of my expensive sunflower seeds go to the birds I really want to feed, while the jays make do mostly with less costly corn. That way, all the birds get something to eat, and I don’t have to worry that the jays are eating me out of house and home.

I also take consolation in knowing that this, too, will pass. By the time the snow settles in for the long winter, the jays’ hoarding instinct diminishes greatly. They still come to the feeders, but they come to eat, not just to cart it all away.