Friendly campsite visitors cache food for winter

Within minutes of setting up the tent and pulling out the coleman stove, the first visitors to our campsite appeared: gray jays. It almost seemed like the opening and closing of the truck door was a dinner bell.

Often referred to as “camp robbers” for a reason, these tame birds will perch on the coleman stove and snatch food from your plate if you aren’t careful. To many camper’s delight, gray jays will land on an outstretched hand holding a morsel of food.

They will keep coming back as long as there is food. Not a creature to pass by an easy meal, once a gray jay associates humans with food, it will check out every human to see if food is available.

With a varied diet of seeds, insects, berries and even carrion, gray jays eat whatever is available to maximize their caloric intake and reduce energy expenditures. They will even pluck engorged deer ticks from moose during the winter to eat.

While at the campsite, it may seem that they are gorging themselves on crackers crumbs but they are most likely caching the food for winter.

Gray jays have a unique system of caching, unlike any other bird species. Once a morsel of food is obtained it will roll the food into a ball inside its beak. Then the salivary glands secrete a sticky saliva that coats the ball. The saliva protects the food and acts as glue. The gray jay then hides the food under tree branches, in holes or under pieces of bark.

The key to their caching is to hide food in places that are snow-free throughout the winter. While the gray jay might find some food throughout the winter, it relies heavily on its cached food, which may number in the thousands.

Caching is an adaptation that enables the gray jay to survive the harsh winters of the high country and high latitudes because it doesn’t migrate. With a range from Alaska to Labrador to northern New England and down the Rocky Mountains, the gray jay favors remote boreal and subalpine forests.

These forests contain the spruce and lodgepole pine trees that have pliable scales in a shingle-like fashion that enable the gray jay to wedge food beneath the bark.

Even with thousands of cache sites, gray jays can remember where the food is stored. Gray jays will even move cached food if another gray jay was present during the original caching because the other gray jay may return to the cache first.

The gray jays unique system of caching allows it to survive year-round in the forests of the north. Without the hazards of migration or hunger from lack of food, gray jays often live for more than ten years.

By residing in the same territory every year, the gray jay can capitalize on regularly visited campsites. I’m sure our visitors had regular rounds to check if any crumbs were dropped or if there were any handouts.

Laura Roady is owner of Roady Outdoor Photography and is a freelance photographer and writer. She can be reached at 597-5702 or roadyphoto@gmail.com