Climate Change Threatens Canada Jays’ Food Cache Sites By Cheryl Lyn Dybas • Photos by Ilya Raskin Camp robber, meat bird. Lumberjack, venison hawk, moose bird. “All are expressive of its character and behavior,” writes Arthur Cleveland Bent in his 1946 Life Histories of North American Jays, Crows, and Titmice. “It” is the Canada jay, once known as the gray jay. “This bird…greets the camper with demonstrations of welcome and shares his meals,” Bent writes. The jay’s presence is nearly ubiquitous in boreal spruce-fir forests, where it snatches every morsel of food it finds and wings off to hide its treasure. Canada jays, wrote William Brewster in 1937, “place a mouthful of oatmeal on the branch of a hemlock, three or four crumbs of bread in a dead stub, or a large piece of bread on the twigs of a fir.” That hoarding, however, may be the species’ downfall. Perisoreus canadensis was known as the Canada jay until 1957—when the American Ornithologists’ Union changed its common name to gray jay. Then in 2018 the gray jay once again became the Canada jay, thanks to the efforts of researchers at Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park and elsewhere, who argued that the jay is a quintessentially Canadian bird. The Canada jay’s range spans northern North America, from Alaska east to Newfoundland and Labrador, and south to the northern reaches of the continental U.S. in regions such as the Upper Midwest, New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and New England. Ornithologists like Ryan Norris of the University of Guelph have been working to get the jay recognized as Canada’s national bird, an effort that, despite backing in naturalist circles, hasn’t quite taken off. If it doesn’t happen soon, jay-watchers say, it may be too late. Canada’s, especially Ontario’s, climate is warming, putting the jays—and their carefully stashed food resources—at risk.
Freezer on the Fritz Ontario may be one of the best places on Earth to study the effects of climate change, say scientists like Norris. Compared to the rest of the world, southern Ontario is warming twice as rapidly, and northern Ontario three times as fast, according to Francois Brissette and Annie Poulin of the Hydrology Climate Change Laboratory (HC3) at the École de technologie supérieure de Montréal. In years to come, that heating up, Brissette and Poulin say, will not be evenly distributed across the seasons. Winters will warm significantly more than summers. Future winters will be 4.5-8 degrees C warmer, with much less snow. “Model projections indicate that these changes will continue, highlighting that the risks currently
Biologist Ryan Norris is conducting a longterm study of Canada jays in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. | DAN STRICKLAND presented by climate change will become even greater,” states the document Canada in a Changing Climate. “November seems more like October and April like May,” observes Drew Monkman in Nature’s Year: Changing Seasons in Central and Eastern Ontario. “One can’t help but wonder how much longer we’ll be able to depend on the seasonal rituals we’ve kept for so long.” Canada jays would agree. Already, they’re chasing winter. Changing autumn freeze-thaw cycles threaten the survival of these iconic birds in southern Ontario, recent research reveals. Led by Norris, the study links food spoilage caused by more frequent freeze-thaw events with the birds’ population decline in parts of the province. New climate-driven freeze-thaw patterns—the equivalent of unplugging and plugging in a freezer—are spoiling the birds’ cached food supplies. That leaves less food for overwintering, leading to production of fewer young and young in poorer condition. These “carry-over effects” are driving population declines along the southern edge of the jays’ Canadian
Iconic birds of boreal spruce-fir forests, Canada jays range from Alaska east to Newfoundland and Labrador, and south to U.S. regions such as the Upper Midwest. 18
OCTOBER 2023
NORTHERN WILDS
