Flash dresser with a fetish for acorns
FOLLOWING the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, oak forests spread northwards at the rate of nearly 2km a year — all because of a bird.
Colourful crows called jays (garrulus glandarius) every year collect thousands of acorns to bury and hide in winter larders.
These birds have remarkable memories and usually find the hidden caches, but not all, and so from those missed acorns will spring saplings to eventually become mighty monarchs of the woodlands.
The jay is an elusive, easily disturbed bird, usually seen singly or occasionally in small noisy groups deep in woods or occasionally in old gardens with mature trees.
A reader in Douglas, Cork, had a surprise sighting last weekend in his garden of a bird apparently eating an acorn which it may have dug up (he has a couple of oak trees).
Interestingly, last winter he came upon a small group of jays in woodland in the same area while out in the snow with his family.
Jays are attractive birds with a grand splash of colour and a reputation for showiness, despite shyness.
Its name is a somewhat dismissive term for a flash dresser — pinkish-fawn body, head with pale streaked crest that rises on display, blue and white wing patterns and delicate black barring, long black tail and white rump.
It is a loud chatterer and the Welsh call it the ‘screecher-of-the-wood’; its Irish name is ‘scréachóg’.
A century ago, the naturalist WH Hudson wrote that the bird was “not altogether unworthy” of being called the British Bird of Paradise.
Jays have also a reputation for mimicry, like starlings, and there was a time when tamed birds were trained to produce the sounds of cats, crows and owls.
One man trained his bird to bark like a dog and make alarm clock sounds. But in the wild, it is essentially a woodland dweller, flitting about seeking caterpillars, beetles and other insects and, like its cousins, magpies, raiding birds’ nests for eggs and young and also hunting small mammals.
But its great reputation is as a collector of acorns.
In autumn it plucks them from oak trees, carrying them singly by beak or several in a throat pouch to hide in tree crevices or bury under dead leaves, sticks and earth.
During a two-month harvesting period one bird may make 50 sorties a day and can collect around 5,000 acorns to hide away, its remarkable memory enabling it to locate its stores even when buried under snow.
The birds’ great enemies may still be gamekeepers of shooting estates, protective of their flocks of pheasant poults.
There is also a by-harvest of colourful plumage, sought by fly-tiers for salmon and trout angling.
Many years have passed since I last saw a jay. This was in woodland scrub in storied Kilcash in Co Tipperary: “What shall we do for timber?/The last of the woods is down.”
Another poem from the 17 th century went: “…All the woods are falling…so we’ ll to the ships at Galway/ Seán Uí Dhuibhir a ghleanna, your pleasure is no more…”
I am sure jays are still in the shadows of those Tipperary woods, where “the stag is on the mountain, swift and proud as ever”, and is turning up its bounty now as spring softens the earth.