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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Feeding time for gray jays?

Study shows supplemental feeding can help these friendly jays, especially in late winter

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 4/5/17

It’s April. Have you fed your neighborhood gray jays?

It very well may be an important question, based on the findings of one of the longest-running studies of this notable North Country …

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Feeding time for gray jays?

Study shows supplemental feeding can help these friendly jays, especially in late winter

Posted

It’s April. Have you fed your neighborhood gray jays?

It very well may be an important question, based on the findings of one of the longest-running studies of this notable North Country denizen. Biologists have been studying the gray jays in Algonquin Provincial Park in east-central Ontario for the past 50 years. More recently, they’ve been trying to understand why the gray jay population is declining so rapidly in the park. Indeed, the population has dropped by more than 50 percent in the park over the past few decades.

Researchers are beginning to understand why, and their findings are directly relevant to the future of the species here in northeastern Minnesota. Algonquin Park, located about 125 northwest of Ottawa, actually sits well to the south of our region (almost 150 miles) in terms of latitude, and it’s right at the southern edge of the gray jay’s traditional range. That makes it a good place to test how things like climate change might be affecting the species. Turns out, there is good evidence that warming temperatures are negatively affecting gray jay survival and reproduction.

Not surprisingly, access to food is a big part of the puzzle, and for the gray jay, the steady rise in temperatures is affecting food availability for the species. It’s not so much that their traditional foods are disappearing. Gray jays will exploit a wide range of foods, ranging from fungi to berries to carrion and warming temperatures aren’t really affecting availability of such things.

But gray jays, as I’ve written before, have unique adaptations and strategies that allow them to survive in the cold boreal forest. Just as many of us here in the North Country use the summer and fall to stock up the freezer, grays are busy from August through November putting away their own winter food supplies. Using their sticky saliva, gray jays collect bits of food throughout the late summer and fall and form it into pea-sized packets that they then attach to trees and branches. During the fall, they stash hundreds of these little meals all throughout their large territories and largely rely on them over the winter.

But just as our food can go bad in the freezer when the power goes out, warming winter temperatures, particularly in the fall and early winter, appear to be limiting food availability for gray jays. It’s not a dramatic loss of food supply— the research suggests that about 10-15 percent more of their food caches are deteriorating before the jays can make use of them. That doesn’t mean they’re starving, but we know that limited access to food invariably affects reproductive potential, which means female gray jays are laying fewer eggs. That’s a recipe for a long and steady decline in any population.

As with most things in nature, the picture isn’t black and white. Warmer late winter temperatures appear to be helping gray jays somewhat, since it appears to be improving the survival of those eggs that are laid.

On balance, unfortunately, the harmful effects are outweighing the beneficial, and the proof is in the population decline.

Of course, the effects of climate change aren’t limited to one provincial park. Indeed, northeastern Minnesota, much of northern Canada, and the Arctic, have experienced even more dramatic warming than places like east-central Ontario. While the evidence isn’t conclusive, there is at least anecdotal evidence that the gray jay population is declining in our area as well.

Which gets me back to my opening question. The research also found that gray jays are aided by supplemental feeding, particularly in April. That’s when they are typically feeding nestlings and when their still-edible winter food stores may be running empty.

Gray jays, in part because they normally have abundant food stores even in the depths of winter, begin nesting as early as February or March, much earlier than most other birds. And when birds are raising young, their energy demands are high and if food caches are deteriorating, it’s good to have another source of food. The research points to April as the best month to give the gray jays a helping hand. So, I have to run. I’ve got a few gray jays looking for me out in the yard!