In New Mexico, Unraveling the Plight of the Pinyon Jay

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A Western landscape and its namesake bird are threatened by climate change and wildfire prevention efforts.

ANASAL, laughing bird call echoed through the Ortiz Mountains in northern New Mexico this September. A couple of pinyon jays chattered loudly as they flew over the piñon pine and juniper woodlands that sweep across the foothills. “They have really fun calls,” said Peggy Darr, then the resource management specialist with Santa Fe County’s Open Space, Trails, and Parks Program. “They’re a very hard bird not to love.”

The jays forage for piñon nuts in the dense habitat on the ridgetop in fall and winter, then cache them in more open areas near the road, she said. Caching is critical for the jays’ survival, but also for the trees. Pinyon jays and piñon pines are wholly interdependent — the piñon nuts provide essential sustenance for the bird, and the jay offers critical seed dispersal for the tree. The pinyon jay is a keystone species of these arid forests of diverse piñon pines and junipers, extending over 150,000 square miles across 13 Western states.

In New Mexico, Unraveling the Plight of the Pinyon Jay

 

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Here is another relevant article.

The Intimate Relationship Between Pinyon Jays and Piñon Pines Is Unraveling

Drought, beetle infestations, and warming temperatures have pushed both species into a snowballing decline. Scientists are working to revive them.

In a patch of piñon pines, Bianca Sicich, a graduate student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, hides in a blind holding a string. The string is attached to the door of a homemade trap of PVC and wire that she’s baited with sunflower seeds and a few piñon nuts. She sits there quietly for hours, awaiting a flock of Pinyon Jays, a species critical to the piñon-juniper ecosystem's survival. If she’s successful in capturing birds in her trap, she will tag them with radio transmitters to follow their movements across large home territories. Through this and other studies, Sicich wants to learn whether Pinyon Jays will have enough food if piñon pines, the birds’ main food source, stop producing seed as the climate warms and drought intensifies.

Pinyon Jays and piñon pines share an intimate relationship. The cerulean corvids live in the trees year-round, nesting in their branches and eating piñon seeds. In return, the birds help the trees proliferate. Every few years, piñon pines produce a mast crop of cones. When that happens, within weeks a large flock of Pinyon Jays can harvest millions of seeds to cache for winter. This bounty lets them nest in greater numbers and raise more young. But they forget where they hide 10 percent of seeds; these grow into the next generation of trees. Although other animals also carry seeds. Pinyon Jays, which haul 50 at a time, are the only dispersers able to reestablish pines after disturbances like fires and insect infestations.

The Intimate Relationship Between Pinyon Jays and Piñon Pines Is Unraveling | Audubon