[texbirds] Blue Jays and West Nile
- From: Joseph Kennedy <josephkennedy36@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: 4 Texbirds Maillist <texbirds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2012 16:07:31 -0500
Fred Collins mentioned
"However, Blue Jays have been unusually noticeable and abundant of late.
The acorn crop on the live oaks is nothing short of spectacular here so
that may account for the jay numbers. Perhaps jays have “learned” to leave
town in late summer and go to more rural areas where West Nile is less
concentrated and less likely to trouble them."
I think that they leave town or move around for food sources. House finches
will vanish from feeders here in Houston about mid-October and go as far as
Waller County to feed on ragweed seed which has a higher protein count than
sunflowers etc.
Chambers County crows in the area south of Anahuac were not really hit by
west nile since in arrived in 2002 and are still at the usual spots. But
crows are not birds of of the coastal strip, high island, smith point etc.
as they are very susceptible to hurricanes. A crow at the hawk watch tower
is rare.
But come early fall for about a week there are large family groups of crows
wandering the peninsula and feeding on some sort of fruit (maybe pawpaw or
persimmon) and then they go home and do not migrate over the tower or
Bolivar. I have seen such groups come as close to the actual point as
Frankland road but never at Candy Abshier except as rare singles.
My assumption has always been that these groups are going to ancestral
feeding grounds where older crows take the family down to where their
parents and grandparents had taken them.
I see this at home on a mini-scale. All the oaks around my home are water
oaks with a few red oaks. One has to go out to Voss and the super markets
to find ornamental planted live oaks. When the water oak acorn crop fails,
the local jays spent the day flying from as far as Kincaid school over to
Voss and gathering acorns to take home. Doing it all day every other year
or so. Whether they went as a family or followed others of course is not
known. But after several bad WNV die-offs, they no longer went there. Last
winter there were no local acorns but lots in the watered live oaks on Voss
but no jays went there.
Several clans of crow people always came to a group of pecans down the
street where I spent hours watching them move pecans out into the traffic
from the sidewalk and gutter so that cars would hit them. But the very few
surviving crows apparently have no one to take them to the pecans or how to
have them cracked and the nuts are uneaten by birds.
About 10 years after I moved here, one or a couple of blue jays learned to
hunt cicadas and katydids by sound. When one of the bugs started its
courtship calls, the jays would listen and hone in and either spot or flush
the bug and chase it from perch to perch. Great fun to watch the youngsters
follow the parents and try to catch their own meal; it usually took a
couple of weeks before they did it well. Since the great jay die-off in
2002, I have never seen a jay hunt cicadas as there was no one to teach the
young birds how to do it.
As an aside, I had my first cicada of the summer yesterday evening. The had
vanished during the drought last year and apparently there was no new
generation of eggs that survived either. Even the neighbors talk about how
quiet it is this year.
Back to blue jays, there have been a couple of years when there was a more
general acorn failure and most of the birds suddenly vanished and did not
return until mid march of the following year. And there has been temporary
movement away for a few weeks only in November in several other years at
the time that ripe acorns are falling.
--
Joseph C. Kennedy
on Buffalo Bayou in West Houston
Josephkennedy36@xxxxxxxxx
Other related posts:
