{"id":90779,"date":"2020-10-28T05:15:18","date_gmt":"2020-10-28T11:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=90779"},"modified":"2020-10-28T07:04:47","modified_gmt":"2020-10-28T13:04:47","slug":"scrub-jay-a-creative-technique-for-getting-at-hard-to-reach-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/28\/scrub-jay-a-creative-technique-for-getting-at-hard-to-reach-food\/","title":{"rendered":"Scrub Jay – A Creative Technique For Getting At Hard To Reach Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

Birds are smart and capable of learning. They find what works, especially when food is involved.<\/p>\n

Yesterday was an unusually slow morning for birds in the mountains of the west desert. I only photographed two birds but one of them, a Woodhouse’s Scrub Jay, demonstrated some interesting feeding behavior.<\/p>\n

The photos below are cluttered with branches but those branches are part of the story. The jay often had ‘his’ back to me and there was rarely light in his eye but it’s the behavior that interests me most.<\/p>\n

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OK, here’s the problem as I see it.<\/p>\n

The jay was in the middle of a jumbled thicket of hundreds of small branches and twigs and the food ‘he’ was after, a clump of (sumac?) berries above his head was just out of reach. The twig the berries were on was too flimsy to support his weight, as were all of the other nearby twigs so he had no choice but to stay where he was. But he really wanted those berries.<\/p>\n

Stretching alone still put the berries just out of reach but just barely. The perch he was on was the only secure one he could find that was this close to the berries and he really didn’t want to let go of it because he would fall into the jumble of twigs which would put him in a real predicament and his wings would be beat up as he tried to get out of it.<\/p>\n

His solution was to use two techniques simultaneously: stretching toward the\u00a0 berries and…<\/p>\n

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flapping his wings to pull his perch up, not much but just enough to allow him to reach them.<\/p>\n

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And it worked, repeatedly. Many times he stretched and flapped simultaneously while grabbing a berry without ever letting go of the perch.<\/p>\n

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Here he’s eyeing another berry after swallowing the previous one.<\/p>\n

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Stretching and flapping simultaneously…<\/p>\n

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without letting go of the perch…<\/p>\n

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worked again.<\/p>\n

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And again. This one made me chuckle because it looks to me like he’s enjoying a celebratory stuffed green olive after finishing his martini.<\/p>\n

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His technique worked every time but that’s not to say he didn’t lose his balance occasionally.<\/p>\n

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Let’s do it again.<\/p>\n

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Success.<\/p>\n

I photographed him using this technique 6-7 times and as as far as I could tell it never failed. Never once did his feet leave the perch, except momentarily when he’d lose his balance. It seems to me this would have to be a learned behavior that he’s figured out by trial and error – he’s probably done it several times before.<\/p>\n

I know, it’s really no big deal but I’m so fascinated by behaviors I sometimes focus on what some would call minutia.<\/p>\n

Can’t help myself – minutia matters.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Note: I didn’t have time to include specs for each individual image but most were at or close to 1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Birds are smart and capable of learning. They find what works, especially when food is involved.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,392,3722],"tags":[3723,50,2232,5419,311,5386],"class_list":["post-90779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-woodhouses-scrub-jay","tag-aphelocoma-woodhouseii","tag-behavior","tag-feeding-technique","tag-learning-by-trial-and-error","tag-utah-2","tag-woodhouses-scrub-jay"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/woodhouses-scrub-jay-5675-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-nCb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}