Pinyon Jay Project Update

GBBO has been continuing its work to better understand the causes behind the rapid, ongoing decline in Pinyon Jays.  This decline of 4-5% per year has been occurring over the last 30 years, and has been well-documented by BBS data. However, its causes have not yet been adequately explained, in part because Pinyon Jays have been a poorly studied species in much of their range and present many challenges for field biologists. Nevertheless, we have been successful in efforts to deploy radio tags on Pinyon Jays, and have over the past year conducted a detailed nest study and habitat use assessment in the Desatoya Mountains of western-central Nevada. 

Although data from the last year are still being analyzed, all of our findings to date are consistent with a picture of Pinyon Jays as a species that prefers transitional ecotones between pinyon-juniper woodlands and sagebrush.  Because many of these mixed-age, mixed-structure transitional areas have been supplanted over the last century by larger and denser pinyon-juniper woodland patches, we are hypothesizing that the Pinyon Jay's preferred landscape has been reduced in extent. This suggests a possible mechanism that may have contributed to the Pinyon Jay's documented declines, and one that has ramifications for current pinyon-juniper woodland management practices. GBBO will continue its efforts on behalf of Pinyon Jays, and we will be presenting our findings and recommendations in publications in the near future.

- John

Pinyon Jay Monitoring Update

What started out as a radio-telemetry project on Pinyon Jays in the Desatoya Range quickly took a detour into a nest study of Pinyon Jays. Our field crew's Mercer Owen and Sue Bruner were just that good at finding Pinyon Jay nests without any tracking devices. Six colonies and 80 nests later, Mercer has been busy monitoring nest success until the nesting season was over, which it was in the second week of May. With a cool new device, a small remote camera that transmits photos wirelessly to a handheld monitor, we could see and photograph the nest contents while causing almost no disturbance to the nest. Pinyon Jays specialize on pinyon pines, and they cache their seeds so they can eat them in the winter and spring, when other food is pretty much unavailable. 

 
They nest in colonies in pinyon pines at a height of about 8 – 12 ft, and the young from the previous year help feed the new brood. Our study will provide the first comprehensive data on nest site selection by Pinyon Jays in the Great Basin, which will be critical information for advising land managers on how to protect this rapidly declining species. Here are a few photos from the last 6 weeks of the study.

Scenes from the Pinyon Jay project

In March and April, as a part of our Pinyon Jay project in the Desatoya Range, our surveyors located a large number of their nests - here are a couple of nest photos, taken on April 6^th.  Stay tuned for more details!