Gobble, gobble...

...makes you think of the birds that will soon grace many tables on Thanksgiving Day, right? Sounds logical, but I'm not talking about those birds at all. I'm referring to the "greedy" Blue Jays in my backyard gobbling up sunflower seeds and peanuts like they are going out of style...

One of our backyard Blue Jays on the coconut feeder outside our kitchen window. He's not greedy. He's filling the gular pouch in his throat with sunflower seeds to hide in one of his many winter food caches. 

How can one bird eat that many seeds?
It can't! When you see Blue Jays downing one seed after another, watch closely, and you'll see they aren't eating the seeds at all, they are storing them in a pouch in their throats called a gular pouch. Blue Jays have a built-in carrying case called a gular pouch under their tongues. This expandable pouch extends down into their throats as far as the upper esophagus. In late summer and all through the fall Blue Jays and other birds, such as chickadees, nuthatches, and Tufted Titmice, start hoarding acorns and other seeds and nuts in winter caches. By storing their food, they can survive long, cold winters when their normal food sources freeze over or run out.

Click here for an older post with photos of a Blue Jay filling his gular pouch with peanuts, and learn how Blue Jays with their acorn caching ways repopulated areas with oak trees after the last glaciers retreated.

Click here for an earlier post on scatter-hoarding and winter food-caching birds in our area.

Gobble, gobble...it's fun to watch Blue Jays gobbling up sunflower seeds. They waste no time filling their gular pouches, then fly off to a winter cache, deposit them, and come back for more.

Blue Jays behaving badly (or is it just fall migration?)...
While most of the red, yellow and gold leaves of autumn have fallen from the trees and faded away, it's still fall, and Blue Jays are still out there doing their autumn antics. My mom called a few weeks ago reporting 17 Blue Jays were in her backyard behaving badly. They were impersonating hawks, stealing seed, frightening the titmice, and taking over every feeder in their yard...but, she loved it! It's very exciting to have a marauding band of migrating Blue Jays in your yard, especially when you live in the city! She wanted to know what was going on, so I let her know in autumn, some northern Blue Jays take to the wing and migrate south, while others stay put. When they migrate, they form large groups of what really do look like marauding bands, and when a flock lands in your backyard, watch out. They will raid all of your feeders and plunder till nothing remains. Then they will be gone in a flash, not to return.

Click here for a pdf of a paper by Paul A. Stewart in North American Bird Bander, July-Sep. 1982, titled, "Migration of Blue Jays in Eastern North America," pgs 107 - 112. Stewart analyzes banding and recovery records to identify the birds' migratory movements, showing Blue Jays are partly migratory because some groups stay throughout the year, and of those that do migrate, not all return to their same nesting grounds. Stewart includes maps that show the locations of direct recoveries of banded migratory birds.

This fellow is not part of a marauding band. He's just a regular at the Coconut Cafe outside our kitchen window. 

...put the blue in the coconut and shake it all up. 

Gobble up those sunflower seeds Ol' Blue and secret them off to your winter food cache. Your scatter-hoarding will get you through the winter, plus it's great for seed dispersal!

An Anhinga sitting on a nest...

I almost missed this male Anhinga sitting on a nest. With his dark head held skyward, he bordered on invisible. You would think a big black and white bird would stand out in a sea of green leaves, but he didn't. His upward tilting head must have tricked my brain into thinking it was a branch and his dark feathers were shadows, but I was lucky because it was a hot day, and the fluttering of his gular pouch gave him away. The movement, made to help regulate his body temperature, was just enough to bring my eye back to his location....and there he was. Wow! My first nesting Anhinga at Pinckney Island...

An incredibly beautiful bird, this male Anhinga sat patiently on the nest incubating eggs. Males have mostly black body plumage. During the breeding season they develop a shaggy crest and mane, which are not apparent in this photo, but you can see the "filoplumes" on the sides of the face and neck. These feathers are silky and almost hairlike.

Anhingas are aquatic birds that do their hunting under the water. With their necks coiled back, they hold their bills open a little, so when they do strike with those sharp and pointed bills, they leave two puncture marks. After Anhingas eat, they climb up on a branch and open their water-logged wings to dry.

The ability of an Anhinga to strike out with lighting speed to impale its prey on its sharp bill while underwater is because of a hinge-like mechanism between the eight and ninth cervical vertebrae, and a keel on the underside between the fifth and seventh cervical vertebrae that muscles attach to. When this hinge-like mechanism is sprung, the muscles propel the bill forward like a spear being thrown (similar to herons and egrets). I wanted to see what this looked like and found a very cool drawing of a skeleton of an Anhinga's neck showing the muscles and hinge from 1913--click here for the drawing (sources: "National Geographic Reference Atlas to the Birds of North America," Mel Baughman, pg. 64--one of my favorite reference books, and a Wikipedia article on Darters, here.)

Note: The drawing of the Anhinga's spine is from "Die Vogel: Handbuch der Systematischen Ornithologie, Volume 1," by Anton Reichenow. Click here for a link to the book. If you speak German and like old pen and ink drawings, you'll like looking through the book.

A female Anhinga perches on a limb. Females and juveniles have buff-colored heads, necks and chests.

Look at those feet! I would never have guessed that Anhingas could climb trees, but they can. Their webbed feet are equipped with powerful claws that let them climb from the ground up to their nests. Anhingas build their nests over water, but not high in a tree. They like to keep them low enough so they can climb up into them. This nest was located about 15 feet off the ground. We don't have Anhingas here in Cincinnati. They are a strictly a southeastern bird, so I don't get to spend a lot of time watching them and had never seen one climb up a tree. Within two weeks of hatching, baby Anhingas can fall out of the nest into the water below them. To get back to their nest, they climb up the trunk using their claws (source: Baughman, pg. 65).

Water Turkey!

Because an Anhinga's tail feathers resemble a turkey's with a striped pattern and a pale tip, they've been given the nickname of Water Turkey (very fitting for this time of year...).

Hanging the feathers out to dry...

Anhingas, like Cormorants, do not apply waterproofing oils to their feathers to make them waterproof. Instead, the unprotected feathers absorb water, which allows them to stay submerged and swim easily under water.

Feathers that absorb water lose their insulating properties, which causes Anhingas and Cormorants to lose body heat, so when we see them hanging their feathers out to dry, they are also using the sun's heat to stabilize their body temperature. Most of us already knew this, but what I didn't know was Anhingas have a very low metabolic rate and become chilled easily. They are dependent on the sun's heat to ward of hypothermia. As a result, they can spend up to a third of their daylight hours sunning (much more than a cormorant). It also explains why we often see Double-crested Cormorants in Ohio, but almost never see Anhingas (I've never seen an Anhinga in Ohio). An Anhinga's normal territory is the subtropical southeast (source: Baughman, pg. 65).

Snakebird!

Since the Anhinga's feathers are not waterproof, when they get wet, they look shiny and very smooth. When you couple that with a submerged body, a long skinny neck, and a slim head, instead of looking like a bird in the water, it looks like a black snake swimming along, which leads to its second nickname, Snakebird!

I took these photos on June 8, 2011 at the Ibis Pond rookery on Pinckney Island NWR in Hilton Head, SC, except for the last photo, which I took on March 22, 2011 at the Ding Darling NWR.


Video of a male Anhinga sitting on a nest showing gular fluttering in the heat.

Are you going to eat all of that?

Birding Longboat Key, Florida

...continued from the American Brown Pelican post.

This young American Brown Pelican had to fight for every fish he caught, but he was strong willed and did not lose one fish to the pesky gull trying to steal them away! The gull would sit on top of the pelican's head and wait for the water to drain out of the pelican's gular pouch hoping to nab a fish as the pelican opened his bill to swallow his catch down, but this pelican was very patient, and he would sit in the water with his bill closed until the gull was far enough away, then he would tip his head up and swallow the fish down!

...such a patient little pelican...and the thieving gull was patient too, never losing hope of stealing a fish out of the pelican's gular pouch!

You could see the fish moving around in the pelican's gular pouch, but he refused to swallow them until the gull was out of stealing range!

365 days later Ol' Blue is stealing peanuts from Red...and is still trying to get me to rename the blog...

…and that’s just fine because he’s fun to watch, and really he’s just doing his job. After all, Ol' Blue is a bird set up for seed dispersal. He has a built-in carrying case called a gular pouch located under his tongue. This expandable sac extends down into his throat as far as the upper esophagus. Blue’s gular pouch gets quite a workout around our house! As soon as I stock the peanut feeder the Blue Jays start arriving. One, two, three…sometimes up to 15 at a time will perch in the big Ash Tree and take turns swooping in for a peanut, often returning to their original perch to hatch out the peanut and slip it into their gular pouches. It’s fun to watch their throats grow!

Blue sitting in our Ash Tree with his first peanut of the morning.

...he hammers away on the shell...

...eventually grabbing the peanut...

...and slipping it into his gular pouch.

In late summer and early autumn Blue Jays and other birds start hoarding acorns and other seeds/nuts in winter caches. By storing their food, they can survive harsh winter conditions when normal food sources freeze over or run out. (Click here for an earlier post on this subject.) Blue Jays play a critical role in acorn dispersal. When they cache their food, they often dig small holes and bury the acorns, and according to Cornell’s site, All About Birds, Blue Jays store a lot of acorns! In one study, six birds with radio transmitters each stored 3,000 – 5,000 acorns in one season! Not all of the seeds or acorns are retrieved, however, and those that are abandoned often germinate. For this reason, Cornell also mentions Blue Jays were responsible for repopulating areas with oak trees after the last glaciers retreated.

Trip 2, flying in for another peanut after hatching out the first one.

...trip 3...

...trip 4. Rarely do they take just one peanut and move on. They usually return to their same perch to open the shell and store the peanut in their gular pouch before returning to nab another.

How many acorns can a Blue Jay move at once? A lot! A Blue Jay can move up to five acorns at a time—2 or 3 in the gular sac, one in the mouth and the last one at the tip of his bill. I’ve seen Blue Jays hatch out and swallow 8 or 9 single peanuts before moving on. I’ve also seen them swallow a hole peanut shell into their gular sacs…then take another in their mouth….and another in the tip of their bill, but usually, they hatch the peanuts out of the shell and take those.

Blue Jays harvest several thousand acorns each fall 

and bury them in the ground. Any acorns the Blue Jays 

don’t eat sprout into saplings, so squirrels aren’t 

the only ones important to seed dispersal.

So after a year of blogging (my first post was January 3, 2009), Blue is still trying to get me to rename the blog “Blue and the Peanut” (click here for that early post), but I don’t think Red has anything to worry about! I have had so much fun over this past year. I had no idea I would meet so many other birders and bird bloggers. I’m so happy to be part of a community of bird and nature lovers. Thank you for always dropping by to visit and leave a comment or two. (...he's still at it...click here.)

Beak Bit
I wondered how many other birds had gular pouches. Quite a few do, some of the most famous are the pelicans. I love watching them scoop fish into their pouch and carry them off in their big pouches. The frigate birds also have a famous gular pouch, inflating the well-knows red skin during courtship displays in the spring. Other birds with less conspicuous pouches are White-winged Crossbills and Ptarmigans. The gular pouch allows these northern species to store food to make it through the arctic nights or bad snow storms (click for more info). Local birds with gular pouches include, owls. If you’ve ever seen a Great Horned Owl hooting, you’ll see the white feathers under his bill poof out…that’s his gular pouch. Cormorants have visible gular pouches also (click for more info)…just to name a few...