Jays get around rules against feeding wildlife

This week I’d like to return to my trip to Kidney Pond in Baxter State Park, which I had made early last month. I had promised to talk about the other birds I’d seen, but it’s easy to get sidetracked – especially with the red-bellied woodpecker “invasion.”

On our last day at Kidney, fellow camper and friend Carolyn LaBossiere brought my attention to a children’s logbook kept in the camp’s rustic library. In it were children’s observations of nature and wildlife, including a drawing of a red dragonfly and of a rabbit in its hole. But what caught my attention was a passage about a particular bird, dated Sept. 27:

“I saw three jays and they ate out of Jaz’s and I’s hand! The skinny one is Raelle, the fat one that eats a lot is Jay, and the one that lands on your hand and knocks out the food is Jo Jo! Please be nice to them!”

Of course, they were talking about the gray jays. Also known as Canada jay, whiskey jack, gorbie, and camp robber, a visit to Kidney Pond would be amiss without them. Their tame and confiding nature is only a result of their unrelenting drive to obtain and hoard copious amounts of food, but this does nothing to lessen their charm – for me and certain others, anyway. It’s against park rules to feed wildlife, but this doesn’t stop the birds and they can literally become “camp robbers,” helping themselves to food whether they are offered it or not.

The birds have a long history of food pilfering and association with humans. Pursuing their unending quest for food, they have been known to alight on canoes and fly into tents and cabins, often in close proximity to people. A favorite nature writer of mine, R.D. Lawrence, talked about the jays hitching rides on his shoulders during his tramps through the Canadian forest. Ora Willis Knight, in his 1908 book “The Birds of Maine,” wrote, “They are among the tamest, most imprudent and unsuspicious birds imaginable.”

The bird’s behavior is shaped by its environment and by the adaptations it has made to it. The “Birds of North America” species account states starkly and simply: “This species nests during late winter in cold, snowy, and apparently foodless conditions, with eggs incubated at temperatures as low as [minus] 30 degrees C.” (That’s 22 degrees below zero Fahrenheit).

The phrase “apparently foodless conditions” is the key here. The gray jay resides year-round in far northern Canada, Alaska, and parts of the western U.S., as well as a small portion of New England (its largest range in this region is in Maine).

Yet the bird survives deep cold and snow by hoarding tremendous quantities of food that it gathers earlier in the season (such as when campers go for their last hurrah at Kidney Pond in early October). Enlarged salivary glands secrete a specialized, sticky saliva, which is used to bind food items together and adhere them to hiding spaces under tree bark.

Let me not give the impression that humans are their only source of food, however. Gray jays are more than capable of finding their own wild food. Their diet includes berries, seeds, insects, carrion (including fish), small mammals, amphibians, eggs, and nestling birds, and even fungi. They will take advantage of anything edible. A rapacious appetite is necessary when living (and reproducing, no less) in an extreme environment.

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An update on the red-bellied woodpecker invasion: More than 60 birds have now been reported throughout the state.

NEWS bird columnist Chris Corio can be reached at bdnsports@bangordailynews.net