Pinyon Jays: understanding this truly one-of-a-kind bird
Fall migration brings raptors and waterfowl to our reservoirs, warblers and wrens to riparian corridors, sparrows and thrashers to the flats, but one “resident” bird follows a different schedule - Pinyon Jays. These small dusty-blue birds with short tails travel widely across Utah, Arizona and Nevada in search of their favorite food: pine nuts.
Pinyon Jays are unusual among members of the crow family. So unusual, in fact, that they occupy their own genus, Gymnorhinus. The scientific name Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus describes this “bare-nosed, blue headed” bird with featherless nostrils and long, pointed bills that enable them to extract the nutritious high-calorie seeds from the cones of pinyon pines. Even more remarkable is an expandable esophagus that allows these birds to carry dozens of seeds to strategically selected sites where they bury the nuts in the ground for future retrieval. This unusual behavior and the relationship that has developed between pinyon jays and pinyon pines over centuries have become critically important because their population has declined sharply and threatens their survival.
Better information is needed to understand how these birds use the larger landscape to guide land-management and species protection strategies and avoid unintentional damage to sites that appear to be unused when they actually serve an important function in the life cycle of the birds at another time in another place.
To facilitate this effort, two dozen volunteers from Kanab and Washington County are participating in a study by the Bureau of Land Management and Great Basin Bird Observatory. Once a week, participants travel to remote sites to maintain bait stations along the Arizona Strip between Fredonia and House Rock Valley. The stations help researchers locate flocks so they can capture some of the birds with mist nets and fit them with small transmitters. By following their movements, researchers hope to learn which feeding grounds, nesting areas and cache sites the birds depend on. The project will help them determine which parts of the landscape matter to pinyon jays and what they do there.
The Pinyon Jay’s predicament demonstrates an important concept in conservation: counting birds isn’t enough, the relationship between the bird and the land must be understood in order to answer the deceptively simple question: where do Pinyon Jays go when no one is looking?
