Steller’s Jay at Lodgepole Village

         It was mid-afternoon in early April, and I had just arrived at the Lodgepole Village Visitor Center in Sequoia National Park. While the visitor center was still closed for the winter, the familiar screeching of the local Steller’s Jays told me that the market for peanuts was still strong at 6,720 feet. So I pulled out my trusty stash and dropped a few unshelled, unsalted, roasted peanuts on the pine needles beside the cement path.

            Our first jay was quick to descend from high in a nearby pine tree to a smaller pine just next to the peanuts. He hid in this tree for a few minutes and then moseyed out to test the waters on the pine needles. After taking two or three peanuts and burying them nearby, this jay and his mate (who had also arrived) went into a frenzy, retrieving and caching in the immediate vicinity as many of the peanuts as I could drop on the ground.

            It is fascinating to watch a Steller’s Jay hide a peanut. He doesn’t just bury the peanut in the ground and prance off. That would leave his food available for other animals, such as the pestering chipmunk that he kept chasing off while I was watching him. No, he first jams the peanut into the earth at an angle, so the peanut disappears. Then, he taps the peanut into the hole for good measure, and then he takes a big block of dirt into his beak and places it right onto the hole where the peanut has disappeared—a mini-boulder, as it were. He then tamps this dirt down, adding more bits of soil as he desires, and he may even spread a few pine needles around just to be extra sure that the peanut is secure. (Quite a production number, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world!)

            I played around with these Steller’s Jays for a couple of hours that afternoon, in the bright sunlight by the banks of the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River. It is a famous spot, studied by naturalists such as John Muir and graced I’m sure by kings and presidents alike. But the true royalty of this place is the birds themselves, who endure long after we have left this area and returned to our regular lives. And by staking out its territory in the higher elevations, the Steller’s Jay ensures itself the foodstuffs of this habitat without the competition of, say, the Scrub Jay, which prefers the milder climate of the lower elevations.

            Pretty smart bird, that Steller’s Jay!