As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Monday 20 June 2016

Rare scrub jay helps regrow oak forests


By Kathleen Wong, UC Natural Reserve System
Thursday, June 9, 2016

Island scrub jays are expanding oak forests, helping to recover natural habitat on Santa Cruz Island.

Birds are known for a variety of things: being ugly as ducklings, nabbing worms when they turn up early, and flocking together with those of a feather. Tree planting, however, is all too infrequently considered an item on the avian docket.

But on California’s largest Channel Island, birds have donned the proverbial planting overalls of Johnny Appleseed.

The bird in question is the island scrub jay. Found exclusively on Santa Cruz Island, the jay is one of the rarest bird species in the United States.

According to ornithologist Mario Pesendorfer, who works out of the Natural Reserve System’s Santa Cruz Island Reserve field station, the foraging habits of this vivid blue corvid are reversing the vegetation damage inflicted by more than a century of sheep and cattle ranching. As a postgraduate researcher with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Pesendorfer studies oaks and birds at several NRS reserves, including Hastings Natural History Reservation and Sedgwick Reserve.


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