Birds Getting Ready for Winter

by Kevin Strauss

As I was doing yard work over the weekend and getting ready for winter, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one. Several bird species are getting ready for winter as well.

While many bird species migrate south for the winter, the species that do stay here: chickadees, juncos, woodpeckers, owls, bluejays and gray jays, seem to know what’s coming and they appear to plan accordingly. All across the northland, the bluejays and gray jays (also called “timberjays” or “whisky jacks”) and storing up food for the winter. If you watch carefully at your birdfeeder, you might see a bluejay cramming its crop full of corn or sunflower seeds. They it flies off, only to return a minute or two later. It probably couldn’t eat all the seed in it’s crop in that time, and even if it could, it wouldn’t make sense to fly off before eating them, so it must be doing something else: caching seeds. By hiding seeds in holes in a tree or cracks in bark, jays can make sure they have an ample food supply for the winter.

Gray jays, the bluejay’s smaller, drab-colored cousins, have a secret weapon for caching food: huge saliva glands. With these big saliva glands, gray jays make seed “spitwads” and stick these spitwads in hollow trees or cracks to store them for later.
Researchers contend that the jay family is a very “brainy” group of birds and they can probably remember where they are stashing all of these seeds.

Some owl species store mice or voles in holes in trees and let it freeze just like we might do to a pound of hamburger. While letting food freeze is the easy part in winter, the hard thing is figuring out how to eat a frozen mouse. Owls have solved this problem by using a technique they use to keep their eggs warm—they sit on the frozen mice. When the mouse thaws, then the owl has a meal.

But stocking up on food doesn’t mean that a particular bird stops looking for food. The average birds eats one quarter to one half of their body weight in food every day. That would be like an average adult human eating 100-200 quarter-pounder hamburgers. Those stored food supplies are just supplemental food for when it is especially hard to find food after a large snowfall or during a below-zero day.

Some scientists might argue that behavior is instinctive in birds, hard-wired into their brains, rather than something they remember or learn.

The Ely Timberjay