ACORN GATHERER

The garrulous jay is a lifelong friend of the ancient oak. From their adopted orchard in Herefordshire, and unravel a special relationship

ou have to watch your head in the orchard in autumn. Falling apples are the least of your concerns. Huge snags can, and do, fall from the oldest fruit trees. These, in turn, are mere twigs compared to the twisted, scarred limbs of oaks that fall from time to time. But another sound you become conscious of, if sitting for some time in one place, is the soft but certain ‘pshhtt’ of falling acorns. Many of these tumble from the magnificent aged giants in Oak Orchard. Other acorns, however, fall from a clear blue sky! The orchard’s master forester is hard at work.

Silent and furtive throughout the late summer months, our local ‘wood-screechers’ (the Welsh name being Ysgrech y Coed) ramp up the volume. Of all the birds in the orchard, it is only in recent years that we have come to cherish and appreciate the importance of the jay. Where bird populations are already tiny and fractured, nest-raiding jays can become problematic for those species – but in the healthy, food-rich ecosystem of the orchard, we have never found jays to affect any of the smaller birds, such as spotted flycatchers, in the long term. Nests are raided, chicks are eaten, but the jays here are kept in check as well, and must avoid at all costs the blood-red stare of the goshawk. Far from a menace, the jay is a cornerstone species; a vital life force in the world of the orchard.

Garrulus glandarius, the ‘chattering acorn gatherer’, is a lifelong friend of the orchard’s oaks. At this time of year, you can sit and soak in their salmon hues and azure flashing wings as they strip their way through the crown of the Ancient Ones in Oak Orchard. It’s only when you set up a camouflage hide, a telescope, and lavishly scatter acorns on a fallen branch, however, that you get to watch these wary hoarders at work. Head cocked as it lands, the jay looks sceptical. It’s as if someone has put down a large hoard of acorns in one place.

Soon, however, its base instincts get the better of its fiendishly smart brain. The jay swallows one acorn, then another, then another. It’s a little like watching rabbits disappear into a rather small hat. Like their North American cousins, Eurasian jays have evolved elastic, expandable throats – specifically for this reason. This allows them to safely store multiple acorns in their crop, ahead of making a single trip to stash their bounty away. The evolution makes perfect sense; having to take each of one’s shopping items away separately would be time-intensive and waste critical energy. Watchful of the small army of grey squirrels around it, my jay swallows four acorns. The fifth is the one that it keeps carried in its bill. This jay, it turns out, is a little above average. Jays will usually carry three acorns per trip – but the most impressive of their kind can carry up to nine. In a salmoncoloured flash, it bounds off across the golden apple carpet.

Animals that hoard are split into two general categories – ‘scatter hoarders’ and ‘larder hoarders’. We as humans are larder hoarders. Unless possessed of unusual social traits, we rarely scatter food at dozens of locations around our houses and gardens. Jays, however, take the opposite approach. While small larders have on occasion been studied, each individual jay – capable of storing five thousand acorns in the course of a winter – will generally cache these in a baffling range of different sites. With around ten jays, parents and young on the wing by October, this means that around 50,000 acorns will be stashed in and around the orchard each autumn. Some will be wedged securely in cracks in the bark, others buried in the ground (jays may have