A Green Jay Survey

Three, two, one, go. And then just let that hand go. Yep, you're okay. You're okay. I'm okay. And there he goes. He gave you a little goodbye. You did it. Thank you, Doli. What an awesome experience. Yeah, of course. What an awesome experience. Alicia Cavazos has just released a green jay back into the wild. Just 20 minutes earlier, this bird was captured in her backyard as part of a new study taking place in South Texas. That's good. Means he's feisty. Means he's alert. That's what we want to see. We're looking at the home range of green jays in urban areas to determine if they're kind of staying in certain backyards or if they're moving around. We just don't know a lot about what they're doing in urban areas. The green jay occurs from South America north to Texas. In North and Central America, the bird's range extends from Honduras north through Mexico and into the brushlands of South Texas. There's like eight of them. We don't know a lot about green jays, first of all, so it's important to know what they're doing if we want to be able to manage for them. And we want to manage for them because we have a lot of bird watchers that come into the valley, and one of the species that they really want to see are green jays. Oh yeah, it looks hungry. It's just cool. A lot of them are camouflage or blending in, but that one really pops out. The Rio Grande Valley is, I think, the third fastest growing urban area in the country. It's expanding at a rapid rate. A lot of urbanization, a lot of habitat change is going on. And so these birds have been able to adapt to a certain extent. In order to understand how green jays are adapting to the rapidly changing environment of the valley, Toni plans to trap, tag, and track up to 10 birds a year. Well, Toni brought this cage to me about a week and a half ago and had me set it up here under the shade. Donna McCowan's yard in Harlingen is a paradise for birds of all kinds. With the cage door open, we were putting corn and peanuts in it. So the birds would get used to it and just assume it's supposed to be there, and they had no problem getting in and out of it. This morning, we're going to close the top of it and watch and wait for the birds to show up. Usually what I find is it takes one bird to be in the trap, and then once that happens, all the other birds are like, oh, I can just go right in. There's one. He goes, wait a minute, this is how I got in before. We're setting the traps up in areas where we know that green jays occur. Okay, those peanuts should be pretty irresistible. So now we're waiting around for them to figure out, okay, this is where the food is, and that's how I get to it, and then they should just walk into the trap to get the food. Almost. That's where you went well ago, on the other side. They're a jay, so they're a smart, intelligent bird. There you go. And inquisitive. You watch them, and they're jumping around, they're looking at different things, they're investigating stuff, and they're fun to watch. No, not yet. We've got doves, we've got crackles, we've had a rabbit go in. So far today, we haven't had a ton of luck, but we're hopeful. Hey, Alicia, we're going to head over to your place now, okay? So get ready, we're coming. After an hour of waiting without much success, Tony decides it's time to check on another trap he has set up about 15 miles down the road in San Benito. The green jays come to my yard all the time, so I offered my house to Parks and Wildlife so they can do this study. I'm just so excited because I love the green jays. As you can see, I'm wearing my lucky green jay shirt. We had some green jays coming in and investigating it, but they didn't go in yet. A couple of minutes ago, Donna McCown, whose house that we were at earlier, just let me know that she did get a green jay in her trap. I finally caught the green jay. So we're going to head over there now and process that bird. This is typical urban ecology. You're bopping between places pretty frequently, trying to get to the animals you need to get to as fast as possible. All right, so we got the bird in the trap. It went in, and we're just going to reach through the top and grab it. All right, so there's our bird. We'll put a color band on the bird, and we'll put a silver band on the bird. If we see the bird running around, we can at least look at the leg and say, OK, it has a color band on it, and I know what individual bird that is. So this is on the left leg. We'll take a wing measurement, 116. Yep, a tail measurement, 132. If it weighs a certain amount, so that's 91, we'll put a radio transmitter on the back, and that will help us observe them as well. So we're going to put it right about there. The radio is going to fall off before the radio dies, and that's good. We get our data that we need, the transmitter falls off, and the bird goes about its life as normal. So Donna, the way you're going to release it is you're going to put two fingers over the head like this, and you're going to control the bird like that. I think initially it thought, oh no, this is it. This is how I get eaten. And you know, after it doesn't get eaten right away, it probably is just thinking, how do I escape? OK, and we're going to let him go pretty much right into this tree here. OK, OK, and so I'm sure they'll give you a count. Oh, I'm sorry. He was ready to go. I'm sorry. He's right here. He's picking at his bands. Those are new things, so he's trying to figure out what they are, and are they going to stay there, or do I get rid of them? Got to go back to Alicia's house. She got a bird as we were on our way here, so now we're going to go there and transmit her that bird. They're adaptable. That's one of the reasons why we find them in urban areas, but we don't really know what they're doing to be able to adapt. Is it their diet? Are they able to adapt to different kinds of plants that they normally wouldn't use? The hope of this project, the goal is to come up with some habitat recommendations that we can go to landowners and say, listen, green jays are in the area. We all like green jays. They're colorful birds. They're cool birds. All you need to do is X, Y, and Z, and you'll get green jays in your yard. And that is the ultimate goal, to increase habitat for green jays, because in doing so, we'll also help every other bird species we have in the valley out. And that's always a good thing. And there he goes. Thank you, Tully! This project was funded in part by a grant from the Wildlife Restoration Program.