In the afternoon, as I'm sitting and watching TV, the Scrub Jay will often take a perch on a short limb of the apricot tree that rests just outside the window. From this vantage point, he looks in at me, silently requesting (demanding?) a peanut. I fetch a peanut from the plastic jar, and before I've done that, the scrub jay has flown over to the patio area by the sliding door and perched himself atop the back of the chaise lounge there. I throw out a peanut, and he happily picks it up in his beak, gives me a quick look (for good luck?), and flies off down the hill toward the canyon.
It is interesting to watch a scrub jay eat a peanut. First, he peck, peck, pecks into the shell until he creates a hole on one side that is large enough to pull one of the kernels out. After he extracts the kernel, he places it between his toes on a limb or another hard surface, and then he peck, peck, pecks at the kernel, picking small pieces of the kernel off and tipping back his head and swallowing them.
It might take him three to five minutes of constant work to eat both kernels of a peanut. (By contrast, the Common Raven, orca of the crow family, takes about five seconds to pulverize an unshelled peanut with his beak, and another five to ten seconds to consume both kernels of a two-kerneled, unshelled peanut.
It is also interesting to watch the scrub jays behavior with the peanuts during the late afternoon, just before the sun goes down. At this time of day, the scrub jay eschews flying down into the canyon with each peanut. (There isn't enough time.) Instead, he flies about the yard, placing each peanut in a potted plant around the pool, in the grass in the side yard, or even between two leaves of the jade plant that lines the side of the pool in front of the lemon tree. He then quickly reappears before me, asking for more peanuts that he can store for the following day.
The Clark's Nutcracker (another member of the crow family) can store more than 30,000 pine nuts in the ground under the snow during the winter, most of which he retrieves in order to keep himself alive until the spring thaw. My scrub jays don't store nearly that many peanuts, but I'm pretty sure that they know where just about every peanut is around the yard, and beyond. One September, I went around the neighborhood and down into Sullivan Canyon below my house, collecting Coast Live Oak acorns. The scrub jays were also collecting these acorns, from the trees and the ground underneath the trees. I then put a Coast Live Oak acorn next to a peanut out on the patio, to see which food the scrub jay would choose.
He took the peanut.
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