Squirrels and jays
Aug. 10th, 2010 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeHere in the wooded neighborhoods of southeast Eugene, we have two kinds of squirrels and two kinds of jays. Probably three quarters of the squirrels are moderate-sized brown ones that look, as someone from NC once told me, as if they’ve been dusted with cheetos (fyi, corn puff snacks coated with bright orange cheesy powder). The others are larger grey squirrels with very nice bushy tails (like the kindergarten song). The interesting thing is that they don’t seem to overlap in territory at all, but it’s not as though north of some point there are only the brown and south of some point, the grey; it actually seems to be rather random, perhaps some accident of squirrel migration and settlement history. If I had a lot more leisure time to be a backyard naturalist, I think it would be fun to map out the territories and see if there’s any ecological sense to it.
I was thinking of this today because of the jays. In the East Bay, we mostly had Stellar’s jays, or rather, that’s the kind we had in the redwood forests where I spent a lot of my outdoor time (real forests and the northern end of the Berkeley campus, and I didn’t really notice a lot of scrub jays, though I’m certain they live there too. (Stellar’s jays are the ones with the black, crested heads, and scrub jays have a more typical bird head shape, and they’re mostly blue and grey, without any prominent black.) Here in Eugene, nearly all the jays are scrub jays. We have a pair of them in the native oak tree in our yard, and I see them all around town. I did, however, notice that there are some Stellar’s jays in the douglas-fir/red cedar forest where I like to go looking for wildflowers, a mile or two southeast of my house. On my walk this evening, though, in a woodsy neighborhood about half a mile west of my house, I came across a very lively gathering of at least a half dozen Stellar’s jays, and that got me wondering. Is it that about 5% of our local jays are Stellar’s and they’re randomly located, or is it that the scrub jays have fairly intensively settled in the original oak/prairie terrain, while Stellar’s jays have more sparsely settled in the conifer forests?
I was thinking of this today because of the jays. In the East Bay, we mostly had Stellar’s jays, or rather, that’s the kind we had in the redwood forests where I spent a lot of my outdoor time (real forests and the northern end of the Berkeley campus, and I didn’t really notice a lot of scrub jays, though I’m certain they live there too. (Stellar’s jays are the ones with the black, crested heads, and scrub jays have a more typical bird head shape, and they’re mostly blue and grey, without any prominent black.) Here in Eugene, nearly all the jays are scrub jays. We have a pair of them in the native oak tree in our yard, and I see them all around town. I did, however, notice that there are some Stellar’s jays in the douglas-fir/red cedar forest where I like to go looking for wildflowers, a mile or two southeast of my house. On my walk this evening, though, in a woodsy neighborhood about half a mile west of my house, I came across a very lively gathering of at least a half dozen Stellar’s jays, and that got me wondering. Is it that about 5% of our local jays are Stellar’s and they’re randomly located, or is it that the scrub jays have fairly intensively settled in the original oak/prairie terrain, while Stellar’s jays have more sparsely settled in the conifer forests?