There's a bird that's long been considered sort of a pal to people in the North Woods.

Maybe you've been approached by a Canada J interested in your lunch, but it turns out that what may seem like a friendly, trusting gesture may be, in fact, a threat to not only that bird, but other birds as well.

Stick around.

Welcome to windows to the wild.

I'm well online.

This may have happened to you.

I know it's happened to me.

You stopped for a second beside the trail in the woods.

And a Canada J appears on a branch right nearby, looking lustfully at your lunch, you pick out an M&M or a peanut.

Hold it in your hand and it flies down to grab it.

Wonderful moment.

You love being trusted like that.

You is a list that was created by a group of hikers out of sandwich, New Hampshire called the Over the Hill Hikers.

And it was created as a supplement for the well, nice.

I'm sorry.

I couldn't resist all.

Who can resist?

Who can resist that?

But then you put your hand right in front of kept dog, and you people would much rather steer the bird anyway.

But it turns out that may not be quite as harmless as it seems.

I'm in the woods of western Maine, not far from Rangeley.

And I'm in the company of two lovely researchers, Jennifer Long and Marielle.

I got this now post of a dove in your, It's better than a classroom.

Yes.

Much better.

Jennifer Long teaches biology at the University of Maine.

But in a way, she's also a student.

Jennifer has been in the field for more than 25 years studying bird ecology.

I didn't get interested in birds until college, and so I took an ornithology class in college, and, we did like this.

We did a thing where we set up net outside, and as soon as I saw a bird in the hand, I was like, this is it.

This is.

This is what I want to do.

You know.

Well, one of the things that I've studied, for my master's and my PhD is bird migration.

I got really interested in the physiology of bird migration.

Okay, okay.

It's time.

Because they're like superheroes, right?

They can, like, fly nonstop from, you know, here to South America and beyond.

And so I became really fascinated and how they accomplished that.

Ready?

Canada jays are different.

They don't migrate.

They live year round in cold places from Alaska to Canada and northern regions of the United States.

And along came the Canada.

So this was that was Mary Elle's idea.

She's the hiker.

They have been hiking these mountains for a really long time.

I've regularly seen jays, and a lot of people post now on social media about their hiking and their experience.

And there is a huge debate on social media about whether or not people should be feeding these jays.

That's a question Mary Ellen hopes to answer.

She's a behavioral and field ecologist.

She's curious why animals do what they do.

I started hiking these mountains back in 2013.

And I actually became introduced to the Appalachian Mountain Club, the AMC.

So that's kind of how I really got started.

I remember Carter Dome was one of the first groups that I saw, a candidate a day for the first time, and I was wondering who they were.

And other people already knew about them, and they we would sit on the top of a summit and eat our lunch and our snacks, because that's a common practice for hikers.

So the Canada jays were hovering all around.

Oh, some people like to feed them, but then the rest of us are sitting there just like, no, that's our food.

So it was definitely very clear that they interact with humans a lot.

Mary Ellen Jennifer worked together years ago.

The Canada Day brought them back together.

Tell me about it.

What?

I mean, what's going on?

Well, it is cute and cuddly and charismatic as these birds are.

There are also voracious nest predators.

So they eat the eggs of songbird and sometimes even the nestlings.

So we're concerned with how the feeding affects their behavior and how it might draw them into these, popular recreational areas, you know, and how that might affect the local songbirds during the breeding season.

Canada jays grab food wherever they can.

When they're not on the lookout for hikers.

They forage flying from tree to tree in search of their next meal.

Oh, the let anything.

So they eat, like anything from, like, berries and insects.

Small mammals.

I've heard that they'll eat amphibians and they'll eat carrion, so they'll eat large, you know, animals that people have killed.

They have to be opportunistic, right, because they're staying here through the winter when there's no.

And breeding in the winter when there's no food resources.

They have to have a wide, you know, cache of food to carry them through the winter.

Jennifer and Marielle spend the day in search of birds.

They set up missed nets to safely trap passing jays.

Electronic calls let any nearby birds know that something is up their doorstep.

But all their effort goes unrewarded.

The missed nets remain empty, calls unanswered.

But this is an area that's a little less used, a little less hiked by people.

And the birds here are not interested in food and not at all aggressive, but harder to catch.

You know.

So we take it to the mountains in New Hampshire.

Two months earlier, we spent the day with Marielle, Jennifer, and one of her students.

Here.

And this is my student, David.

He's doing a capstone project where he's looking at the habitat of the jays.

We are at Mount Hale.

We're hiking up to see if we can see a family of jays that we were that we captured last year.

We got the female, and we'd like to capture the Jays and band them so we can track individuals over time and see the density of jays here at the top.

To hear the bird community change as you're as you're hiking up, as soon as we get around 3000ft, we start to pick up the black poles and the boreal chickadees and so the bird community totally changes at that point.

And that's something that we're trying to capture with the acoustic recorders, is what the diversity of the bird community is up where the Jays are.

So just in case their altered behavior is somehow altering the diversity.

Hopefully we'll be able to tell the difference.

We'll see.

We still have to analyze that data.

Once at the summit, the team does what most hikers do.

You here.

So you gotta rattle your plastic bag with you.

Trail.

That's the call of the wild.

But we do bring extra trail mix so that we have enough to keep eating in case it takes a little while.

And we also use the trail mix for our behavioral trials.

So I'm the guinea pig.

I'm the decoy.

And I sit there eating trail mix.

And then Jen will sit to the side with her voice recorder and, makes notes to the voice recorder about what their behaviors are as they interact and react to my eating trail mix.

I'm able to quantify their behaviors in reaction to her eating, so I count how many times they swoop over her, how close they get to her, how long they spend within a certain radius of her.

So we can compare different peaks and different areas to see how aggressive they are going after the food.

Here you go.

They're posing for you guys.

What's that feel like?

What's it feel like?

Well, I'm not going to lie.

I can see the appeal because they are very cute and they're surprisingly gentle to.

The cameras keep an eye on artificial nests and eggs.

It's the best way to see how active Canada jays are as predators.

And how human interaction might affect their behavior.

Designed to look, like, like a robin nest or like a Swainson's thrush nest.

And we put those artificial nests in their territory, and then we monitor those for you put in their territory.

What do you expect?

Yeah.

What if.

Oh.

So this is our artificial nest.

So we go out on the turn.

This migratory right.

Yes.

The American robin.

So the blue speckled eggs.

This one's got a little bit of pecking on the egg.

Oh yeah.

Sure enough.

This one, we got them on camera.

The Jays taking the the eggs out and ripping them up.

And.

Yeah, we'll go into town and pick.

I'm picking up these this poor eggs.

So, I'll never feed another jay.

Well.

Oh.

We check to see if there's any invisible nest damage.

So that could either be just some little pecks on the eggs.

Or in the case of the other one, I showed you, you know, eggs entirely ripped out of the nest.

So, particularly if there's visible damage, we look back at the photos that we took with the camera to see who is the culprit.

I'm really interested in the ecology up here on the peaks.

It's fascinating, especially here in New Hampshire.

It's very different from Maine because there's almost, like, really there really like islands up here.

So there's islands of boreal species that you don't see in the surrounding landscape.

We're trying to get information from citizens.

We're trying to get information from posts on social media, because there's been some very popular to go feed the birds, take photos.

Some willing hikers become research partners.

A website invites visitors to report their interactions with Canada Jays.

Because we wanted to get some data from the people that are out here all the time on where they're seeing Jays, how many they're seeing, if they see them, are they being fed, and what types of food.

So we started the Northeast Canada Jays survey.

We've been trying to spread the word, and a lot of people have, you know, oh, it's a junco.

Sorry I got excited.

It was interesting because, I mean, the comments in the beginning, before they knew what was happening, were very amusing.

Oh, but even after I posted, it caused a huge debate because some people were like, oh, that's so cool.

You know, thanks for doing that.

It's great to see what work you're doing.

And then other people are just not fans.

And I can't remember if it was that thread specifically, but some people are worried that whatever we find out is going to deter from their enjoyment of the Canada Day experience.

So the funny part is.

People don't want to be told what to do or they think that we have an agenda.

No agenda, just science.

We've been experimenting with the the tree height app.

Okay.

Especially with the clinometer.

Some of the big takeaways are definitely just coming out into the field and getting exposure long term exposure with professional scientists and really understand their process of getting data and the best way to learn is to do it and having them here has been really helpful.

And and that's why I'm here is like to get experience and to and to really gain more of an appreciation for nature and for the birds.

It's just been great.

They're so cute.

But you can kind of see they're they're scoping us out.

One flew over that way.

It’s like we're surrounded.

I feel like they definitely taunt, like, they feel like they taunt.

Like, I'm convinced they taunt us, like, I don't know if it's true, but I feel that they're definitely like, not.

They’re, like, take delight in our struggling to find them.

They show up right as we're leaving the mountain or Or they come in, we set up and then they're gone.

And then as we're taking things down, they're like, what are you guys doing?

New Caption the team set up, this nets.

♪ If captured, the jays will be banded and blood samples taken.

The data will help track the birds health and movements from year to year.

We're going to do some playback and see if we can get them flying around and then we'll just leave them up for maybe half an hour or so.

I think they figure it out.

If they don't get in right away, they're, they figured out what’s going going on.

They're very smart birds.

(BIRD CALLS) It appears the Canada jays on Mount Hale are wise to the nets.

(BIRD CALLS) Jennifer and Marielle have another option.

They are highly intelligent birds so they do learn.

Which is another big reason for this.

The group of birds that they're in, the corvids, are highly intelligent.

So there's videos of crows learning how to.

Yay.

We got a second one, Jen.

I guess not smart enough.

♪ So catching them has been difficult for us up till now and we're so excited to have two already today because when we band them we can identify individual birds.

So each one gets a unique color combination.

Because one thing that we've been interested in is trying to get an idea of their territory size up here.

Ready?

(BIRD CALLS) I'm gonna put her in the in the bag because we want to get it.

We're trying to also get fecal samples from them and also feather samples we might be able to do samples figuring out what they're eating and that might be able to indicate whether the types of food they're getting are a lot of good stuff for birds or maybe not so great stuff.

(BIRD CALLS) Another thing that we're hoping to try to grab is more is more recordings of the Northeast jays because a lot of the recordings we're using from eBird are from the West Coast or from like, Colorado.

Some of them are that we have some from New York, but there's nothing from specifically the White Mountains.

So I'm wondering, we wonder if the different, the different regions might have different calls.

So hopefully if we could get recordings of jays in this area we could those might be more effective getting bringing them over and attracting them.

Oh, I just feel bad for it.

I feel bad for the Jays in their bag.

♪ Getting two jays in one mountain and seeing them up close again.

It's just it's been a while and it has been a little.

It has been a little rough not not even seeing them for the first full week of this whole trip.

So just being able to see them again has been really interesting and great.

♪ That seemed to work to like toss a little bit of bread in there.

Most of the food that the jays grabbed is put away for the winter.

They, have thousands of caches in these trees.

So they actually have a a large salivary gland that produces, like, this really sticky saliva.

So they basically coat the food with the saliva and then they'll stick it under the bark or under lichen and so they're just caching.

They have a large territory and like thousands of little food caches to carry them through the winter.

And they have to remember where they all are.

(BIRD CALLS) Some really, interesting papers came out recently on their caching behavior.

How with climate change, they're worried about the caches going bad sooner because they're used to caching in winter when it's really cold and it actually helps keep the food preserved.

Yeah, so so there's a correlation between the number of freeze-thaw events in the fall with their reproductive success and that in the winter.

So their caches may be, you know, thawing out and, you know, rotten and not useful come time for breeding.

♪ Two years spent in the field have produced results for the team.

Canada jays, they say, are more aggressive in areas where they're fed compared to places where there's less human interaction.

♪ It means they're more willing to approach humans and artificial nests.

It might be okay for the jays.

So I think Marielle was talking about some of the studies that have been done with supplemental feeding.

And actually it does show that it improves their survival and their reproduction.

So they see that where they're getting supplemental food, you know, they have more fat, they don't have to forage as much in the winter presumably because they've cached all that food.

They can also start breeding earlier and have more eggs in the nest.

So it might be helping the jays, but we're interested in the, the community of birds up here and what it's how it's impacting the community.

Since they are nest predators.

(BIRD CALLS) Hopefully we will have an answer to our question of, you know, what effect they are having.

It could be that they're having no effect on the songbird environment, which would be the best case scenario.

But if there is a negative effect, we do want to know so that we can inform people and luckily, there's a great community around here in the White Mountains and a lot of areas of New Hampshire of, you know, making people more aware of conservation issues and best practices in the outdoors and keeping both the environment and everything else safe.

So if we can come up with a solid message, with some data behind it that would that would be a great place to to finish all of this.

♪ Alrighty.

Peace out.

♪ We have come, once again, to that part of the show I I like least and that is, well, we have to say goodbye, but we do.

I have to thank Jen and Marielle for all they've done for us in finding birds.

You're fantastic.

Thank you.

Thanks.

I just wish I could hang around with you guys longer and see more of them, but we have to say goodbye to now and so thank you.

And, thank you for watching us, I’m Willem Lange and hope to see you again on Windows to the Wild ♪ Support for the production of Windows to the Wild is provided by the Alice J. Reen Charitable Trust, Bailey Charitable Foundation, the Fuller Foundation and viewers like you.

Thank you.

Make a gift to the wild and support the Willem Lange Endowment Fund, established by a friend of New Hampshire PBS.

To learn how you can keep environmental, nature and outdoor programing possible for years to come, call our development team at (603) 868-4467.

Thank you.

♪