We bought some fancy mixed bird seen recently that included lots of nuts, which were avidly sought after by both the squirrels and the blue jays. One morning we were eating breakfast when we noticed one blue jay dropping down into the base of the shrubbery near the house. Peering out carefully so the bird wouldn’t notice, we could see that the jay was burying one of the seeds. Funny that we work so hard to get our children to understand the idea of delayed gratification — that saving something now or practicing something now will pay off later — yet the birds already know it and practice it!

Storing food for later is known as caching. Many birds cache food, including black-capped chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches, crows, blue jays, and many others. Individual blue jays have been known to collect and store thousands of acorns in a season. Some related species like the pinyon jay and Clark’s nutcracker of western North America are known to remember the locations of thousands of buried seeds for many months, even sometimes digging down through the snow to find a cache buried months before.

Here in eastern North America, the sometimes-forgotten or unused blue jay caches of acorns, beech nuts, and other seeds are vitally important for maintaining the tree diversity of our forests. The acorns of an oak tree are so heavy that they can’t be dispersed by the wind, but blue jays can move them significant distances. The assisted dispersal of acorns and other seeds by blue jays has even been suggested to have been a major reason why oaks, beech, and other trees may have been able to colonize areas to the north fairly quickly after the last glacial ice sheet finally melted away.

Researchers have used blue jays to study some interesting aspects of caching behavior in animals. For example, blue jays that had stolen another jay’s cache were less likely to hide food when other jays were present than those that had never engaged in stealing. Other researchers have looked into whether birds store more food when overall environmental conditions are highly variable, which would mean that the availability of future food may be unpredictable. Others have examined whether foods that take longer to handle are more or less likely to be cached.

Oddly enough, some species of birds are more likely to cache easier-to-handle seeds while others are more likely to cache hard-to-handle seeds. Squirrels are found to be less likely to cache seeds when blue jays are around, apparently because they don’t want their caches to be raided by observant blue jays.

Who would have thought that there is so much going on when we casually notice a bird storing food?