Florida scrub jay shows its tameness Bird displays lack of fear to humans

Our birding trip down south brought us into contact with many birds we hadn’t seen before. We were delighted with their abundance and variety; every day brought surprises. However, the most remarkable event was our face-to-face (literally!) encounter with the Florida scrub jay.

We picked a day to visit Oscar Scherer State Park, which was said to contain the largest scrub jay population in southwest Florida. Still, I was skeptical about our chances of actually seeing them; so much depends on being in the right place at the right time. We had visited other areas expecting to see certain birds, but luck just hadn’t been with us.

We needn’t have worried. We saw one of the jays as soon as we approached the trailhead. The bird remained perched atop a tree, giving us decent views, before it flew off. I was elated, but didn’t expect to see any of the birds again. So much in birding consists of brief, one-time glimpses and I’ve learned to treasure these moments without getting my expectations too high. But I still dared to hope.

Again, I needn’t have worried. Before we had traveled too much farther down the trail, I spotted another perched high in a shrub. We moved cautiously for a good photographic vantage point, afraid we’d scare the bird off. Aside from a few curious glances, the bird seemed not to care that we were there, even when we dared going closer. I was even more amazed when it flew into a saw palmetto, captured a tiny green frog, and flew back to the shrub to consume it.

This was a rare treat, for it isn’t often that any wild animal will behave naturally in such close proximity to a human (house sparrows, pigeons, and squirrels being the exceptions). But this bird species was far from common, and close to being endangered. I would have expected it to be extremely shy and wary. Obviously, I didn’t know the Florida scrub jay very well at all.

We continued to encounter the birds along the trail. At one point, two adults foraged for their favorite food of acorns, almost at our feet. We were charmed by their lack of fear.

We thought it couldn’t get any better than this.

Eventually, we left the jays behind and continued along the trail. We saw many other birds that day, and so it was with a feeling of happy tiredness that we approached the park campground that evening. We were hot, hungry, and thirsty, and there was a well-stocked cooler waiting in our car.

Again, we saw the jays. Only this time, they seemed to be paying very much attention to what we were doing, and it soon became obvious that they were following us. Once we sat down to our repast, the jays’ intentions became clear: they converged on our picnic table.

The cheeky rascals were bold enough to perch on our cooler, and one – the boss bird – hopped across the table and sat on the edge of a Tupperware container, looking suggestively from my companion to her leftover pizza inside.

We resisted the great temptation to feed the birds. Intelligent as they were, they quickly realized that any further begging would be useless and went about finding their own food – which they were perfectly capable of doing.

Later I learned the Florida scrub jay is well known for its tameness around humans, displaying this trait to a greater degree than its cousins, the western scrub jay and the more common blue jay. It is a threatened species entirely restricted to Florida, and has been the subject of numerous studies. It breeds cooperatively (the young stay with parents for one or more years, helping them to raise successive broods), and is a habitat specialist: it will only breed successfully in oak scrub.

Unique to Florida, this environment consists of sandy, well-drained soil that supports a layer of different oak scrubs not more than two meters tall, with sparse ground cover of saw palmetto and sand palmetto. This is further interspersed with slash and sand pines. It is dependent upon one vital force for its survival: fire. Without it, the pines and palmettos overgrow and dominate the landscape, reducing the diversity of plant and animal life.

The fire-suppression practices of earlier years allowed exactly this to happen, with the expected results. This, along with destruction of habitat for airfields, super-highways, mobile home parks, shopping malls, rocket-launch complexes, tourist resorts, golf courses and theme parks, drastically reduced the jay’s population, along with that of other animal species.

Our encounter with the Florida scrub jay taught me how much we still have to do – or in this case, not do – to ensure the survival of numerous other species with which we share the planet.

Chris Corio’s column on birds is published each Saturday. Corio, a volunteer at Fields Pond Nature Center in Holden, can be reached at fieldspond@juno.com