The Blue Crow

B

lue is not accurate enough. Cyan, cerulean, cobalt. Shifting to pastel in full sun, ultramarine in shadow. Dozens of birds dyed with pigments harvested from a cloudless summer sky burst the quiet air with raucous laughter as they crest a ridge and descend on piñon pine. They have flown miles across arid woodlands to find masting trees heavy with cones. Each bird fills its expandable esophagus with 30 or more pine nuts that will later be stored in the ground for retrieval early next spring.

This is the Pinyon Jay. Gregarious, nomadic, and spirited, the species is turning heads in the worlds of conservation, land management, and ornithology as wildlife biologists rush to unlock the secrets behind its dramatic and decades-long decline.

Nicknamed the blue crow for its social behavior and crow-like profile, the Pinyon Jay stands distinct from other North American jays. It is the only member of the genus Gymnorhinus, meaning “bare nostrils.” Unlike most other species in the family Corvidae, which include jays and crows, Pinyon Jays lack nasal bristles, a trait thought to prevent feathers from matting when birds probe pitch-filled cones. They are also exceptionally collaborative in almost all dimensions of their lives, from feeding to breeding. They once roved in flocks of hundreds, though today such flock sizes are rarely recorded.

Pinyon Jays have declined an estimated 83.5% since 1967, according to a 2020 report of the Partners in Flight Western Working Group and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), authored by Scott G. Somershoe and colleagues. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies them as vulnerable, and they are under review by the USFWS for potential listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

To understand what’s driving the decline of Pinyon Jays, the author spoke with five experts, including a foundational figure who helped advance our modern understanding of Pinyon Jay biology and four others currently studying the species in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah.

 

John Marzluff, coauthor with Russ Balda of The Pinyon Jay, a 1992 monograph, finds the current decline “incomprehensible.” Asa graduate student in the 1980s, Marzluff enlisted in Balda’s ongoing long-term study of Pinyon Jays around Flagstaff, Arizona. Representing over 20 years of Pinyon Jay research, The Pinyon Jaydescribed the most extensive and long-term study of Pinyon Jay behavior and life history at the time. More than three decades later, it is still the standard. Marzluff, Balda, and a team of students and collaborators tracked complex social interactions and hierarchy among Pinyon Jays through the tagging and observation of hundreds of wild and captive birds.

“They live in a huge society,” Marzluff explains, “and they know the individuals in that society, and they react to them appropriately.”

For example, through a study of birds in captivity, Balda demonstrated that Pinyon Jays deploy transitive inference, wherein a single jay, based on its relationship to other known jays in its social circle, deduces the qualities or hierarchy of a bird with which it has never directly interacted. This requires complex thinking, including short-term and long-term memory.

The studies that formed the foundation of their book were, Marzluff clarifies, primarily about interesting social behavior, not conservation. The steep fall of Pinyon Jay populations was not yet published or widely known, and knowledge about Pinyon Jay populations across the entirety of their range, spanning 14 states in the West (13 in the U.S., one in Mexico), was lacking.

But piñon–juniper woodland has long been an undervalued landscape, historically subject to large-scale destruction, such as chaining, to make way for cattle grazing. Chaining is a controversial mechanical vegetation-removal technique in wide use until the 1990s. Marzluff compares the loss of aged piñon–juniper landscape to the plowing of the Great Plains.

“When we don’t value an ecosystem, we can destroy it very quickly and thoroughly,” he laments.

Researchers today have identified a host of factors that may be at the root of continued Pinyon Jay decline. Whether through drought or outright habitat destruction, most of those possibilities are connected to the diminished health of piñon woodland across decades.

 

In 2016, increasing interest in Pinyon Jays reached an inflection point with the release of the Partners in Flight Landbird Conservation Plan, which identified the species as one of heightened conservation concern. Today, ongoing projects focus on breeding colony surveys, understanding habitat preferences, and exploring the range of factors driving decline.

“They never get boring to watch,” says Amy Seglund, a Species Conservation Coordinator with Colorado Parks and Wildlife who was interviewed for this article.

Seglund is a member of the Pinyon Jay Working Group, a multi-state effort that brings together Pinyon Jay experts and biologists to share research, collaborate, and develop conservation strategies across the bird’s range. Since 2019, her work has prioritized identifying and mapping Pinyon Jay breeding colonies across the state of Colorado. Seglund, alongside graduate student Emily Macklin and other talented technicians and contractors, has confirmed over 121 such colonies.

Seglund describes the joy of an incoming Pinyon Jay flock.

“You can just be a part of their world when they come in and land,” she says. “They are always doing something new.”

For example, although Pinyon Jays are best known for their mutualistic relationship with piñon pine and for their key role in dispersing piñon pine nuts, which ensures the continuation of piñon woodland, they also partake of insects to feed nestlings and fledglings in spring and summer. In 2024, Seglund and colleagues observed Pinyon Jay adults and fledglings feasting on an outbreak of Mormon crickets in northwestern Colorado. And in a recently burned area, adult jays gathering insects for fledglings exhibited flycatching behavior.

Seglund’s surveys run February through May, when Pinyon Jays are tied to breeding colonies. Most aspects of Pinyon Jay life revolve around masting piñon pine. Masting, a process of synchronized cone production across large swaths of trees, occurs every three to five years, and is one of the factors triggering breeding. Young green cones stimulate the enlargement of gonads in male jays. Outside the breeding season, Pinyon Jays are nomadic, traveling far and wide in search of abundant cone crops. They gather up to 50 piñon nuts at a time in a balloon-like esophagus, and cache them in the ground for later use. This hoarding strategy allows them to begin breeding quite early, when the weather is cold and insects unavailable.

Nest finding is, according to Seglund, “an addiction.” With great skill, she has learned to identify the type of piñon–juniper habitat jays prefer for building nests. In general, they hide their nests in clustered boughs of dense juniper or piñon, selecting bushy trees of a wide variety of ages and sizes. They prefer tree clusters at the edge of open spaces, where they can keep a cache site and forage for insects to feed nestlings later in the breeding season.

Surveyors learn to decipher Pinyon Jay vocalizations. Pinyon Jays engage in almost constant communication, with a vocal repertoire of at least 15 calls, including trills and chirrs belonging only to females. The female chirr associated with copulation and nest-building is particularly helpful for surveyors to locate breeding colonies and nests.

Locating a colony is just the beginning. Breeding colony boundaries shift yearly and even within a season. Determining the extent of use requires finding both active and old nests. Failed or late nesters may form satellite colonies, areas removed from the original colony boundary but close enough to benefit from the flock’s protection and cooperative behaviors, making precise edges difficult to define. Satellite colonies included, the size can be as large as 300 hectares, just over a square mile, encompassing a mosaic habitat of open space and trees.

Seglund and her colleagues hope these breeding colony surveys will contribute to a broader understanding of Pinyon Jay habitat requirements, helping agencies like the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plan woodland treatments with Pinyon Jays in mind. Such treatments are carried out for a range of reasons, including fire risk reduction and management of sagebrush–steppe habitat for the Greater Sage-Grouse, another imperiled species, as well as big game. Some of these treatments, including some tree removal in open sagebrush parks, may benefit jays. Seglund advocates for a time restriction, holding off on treatments in breeding colonies during the breeding season to avoid negatively impacting Pinyon Jay reproductive success. Calling upon the expertise of Seglund and her colleagues at Colorado Parks and Wildlife, biologists with the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service are now trained to identify breeding colonies before carrying out treatment plans. In some areas, both agencies have also agreed to pause piñon–juniper woodland treatments entirely during the Pinyon Jay breeding season.

Graduate student Emily Macklin, based out of South Dakota State University, is currently using colony data from surveys across the state of Colorado to create a predictive model of where prime breeding colony habitat might be located. Such a model would help various agencies manage the landscape over the long term with Pinyon Jay conservation at the forefront. Macklin tells Birding that this cross-agency collaboration gives her hope.

“That’s the key to conservation,” she says, “working together.”

 

There is a twist to Seglund’s findings: ravens. These highly intelligent and magnificent birds are predators of many bird species—including Pinyon Jays—during the nesting season.

“Eighty percent of my nests that failed were due to ravens,” Seglund relates.

Once nestlings no longer need brooding, female jays join males in retrieving food for their young. While the parents are away, ravens hunt a colony by flapping at suspected nest trees to elicit a response from nestlings. Once located, ravens easily pluck all nestlings out of the nest. Seglund finds these nests empty with little to no disturbance.

For Pinyon Jays, the challenge is twofold. An increase in raven populations, driven in part by urban development, coincides with already declining Pinyon Jay numbers that weaken a flock’s ability to collectively defend nests. Pinyon Jays, like other corvids, “mob” predators, banding together to boldly scold and harass predators until they leave. Seglund speculates that, at one time, Pinyon Jay flocks averaged much larger and far more successful at deterring predators. Larger colonies would also have hosted many more nests, making it more difficult for ravens to find all nests and snatch all nestlings.

This inability to form an effective mob may be related to a phenomenon called the Allee effect, wherein increasingly lower population size hampers the ability of a highly collaborative and social animal like the Pinyon Jay to effectively carry out critical group tasks, from reproduction to self-defense to foraging. This breakdown in social structure further fuels population decline and, as with the well-known Carolina Parakeet, can spiral a species towards extinction.

Raven predation presents a daunting challenge for Pinyon Jay conservation.

“That was a disheartening thing to find,” Seglund says. “Because what do you do?”

Some Pinyon Jays nest near urban centers, where ravens are often common. Thus, implementing strategies for trash and carcass removal may be one simple way of reducing the presence of ravens.

But when it comes to raven predation, as with most aspects of Pinyon Jay conservation, no easy solution exists. The way forward lies across a vast, complex, and still relatively limited landscape of research and collaboration.

 

To locate nests within a Pinyon Jay colony, you must first outsmart sentinels. Sentinel duties are likely shared among flock members and involve perching high atop a tree and alerting the group to potential threats. Scott Gibson, a Pinyon Jay biologist for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and a member of the Pinyon Jay Working Group, describes the experience of sitting under a tree in a colony, waiting out a staring sentinel. Legs cramp, Gibson moves, and the jay sounds the alarm. The game is off.

Since Utah began formal Pinyon Jay surveys in 2019, over 75 breeding colonies have been identified. Gibson, who coordinates these surveys, importantly funded by USFWS, believes the work so far has only scratched the surface. While the Utah surveys do not yet reveal larger population trends or nest productivity, they do show that Pinyon Jays remain widespread across the state.

Like Seglund, Gibson supervises surveys that inform land management with Pinyon Jay protection in mind. Unsurprisingly, Pinyon Jays use diverse microhabitats to carry out various aspects of their life history; particularly important are mature, cone-bearing piñon trees for seed-foraging, edges for nesting, and nearby clearings for caching. Historically, small pockets of fire caused by lightning created this mosaic of microhabitats, which supported different age classes of trees. Today, cheatgrass, an invasive species, increases wildfire intensity, destroying shrubland transition zones. Cheatgrass also makes it hard to implement prescribed fire regimes. To maintain piñon–juniper habitat that favors Pinyon Jay populations, agencies need to work together to protect or reestablish this heterogenous landscape.

For the past two years, Gibson has played an integral role in developing Utah’s Conservation Agreement and Strategy, a document harnessing the support of multiple agencies to implement management plans for Pinyon Jay conservation on federal lands. Many agencies have already signed on in agreement to the document, including the BLM, USFWS, U.S. Department of Defense, and U.S. National Park Service.

Gibson is especially passionate about this collaborative effort that moves Pinyon Jay research beyond the realm of wildlife biologists and into the hands of those effecting change on the ground through their direct work with piñon–juniper woodlands. Pinyon Jay conservation, Gibson believes, calls for a broader landscape-scale vision, rather than focusing on any one type of treatment. Because Pinyon Jays roam widely after the breeding season, Gibson sees a need for managing piñon–juniper woodlands for heterogeneity on a grander scale, moving beyond immediate Pinyon Jay breeding sites and encompassing their entire range.

Gibson is encouraged by the increased focus on Pinyon Jays and burgeoning multi-state research.

“I think it will get us where we need to be,” he relates. “It’s a slow process. But I think we’re close.”

 

Like Gibson, biologist Lynn Wickersham finds Pinyon Jays difficult to outsmart. Developing a method for studying them has been no small feat. Wickersham leads passerine bird research projects with Animas Biological Studies (ABS), an independent, privately owned wildlife conservation research organization she co-founded. In 2019, ABS picked up an increasing number of Pinyon Jay projects, mainly in New Mexico, with study sites in the Gila National Forest, on BLM lands, and around military installations like Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range.

Wickersham’s projects include surveying as well as using transmitters on leg loop harnesses to track movements of individual jays. The jays are lured with automated feeders that release seeds at certain times. The feeders were primarily filled with black sunflower seeds, but technicians also added piñon nuts, a more expensive yet enticing meal for Pinyon Jays. Later in the breeding season, technicians noticed the feeders, which should have enough food for three to four days, emptied in a day. Eventually, the team observed jays rapping their beaks on the underside of the feeders to make seeds fall into the tray. Jays returned at all times of the day to release seeds at will.

“They were just filling their throats with these seeds,” says Wickersham, “and flying off, telling their friends, and coming back.”

The team tore through their piñon seed budget, just one of the challenges of Pinyon Jay research.

Once a Pinyon Jay is caught, it takes two people to fit the large, strong bird with a leg loop harness, which rests on the bird’s rump. Jays in the hand readily grab clothes and fingers with their feet, which must be pried apart, though the birds are otherwise calm. If piñon seeds are in the throat or beak, a jay will hold onto them throughout the entire banding process.

The transmitters enabled ABS to collect five months of data in 2024 and less in 2025. Wickersham and her team are limited in the type of transmitter they can use due to the weight of the birds. Birds in her study area typically have a mass of 3–4 ounces (90–115 grams). Researchers in other states report higher values, as much as 4.5 ounces (130 grams) for a male. For a bird, this is a big difference. Wickersham believes her jays may not be finding the same robust cone crops as those in other states, resulting in their lighter mass.

Many transmitters failed or were lost. Some Pinyon Jays learned how to take them off by reaching across their back with their beaks. Nonetheless, ABS collected enough data to show that Pinyon Jays in their study sites occupied much larger home ranges than those reported in the literature, meaning Pinyon Jays in New Mexico fly farther to find piñon cone crops. Wickersham believes larger home ranges also contribute to the birds’ light weight.

“They’re flying around more,” she notes, “and using more energy just to maintain their own nutrition.”

Wickersham’s subjects also nested later than Pinyon Jays in other states, beginning in April rather than February and, in some cases, fledging in early July rather than May. Nests were found primarily in juniper–savanna habitat and, in some locations, among ponderosa pine. Their food sources were more varied, and they appeared to rely more on insects. In states like Colorado and Utah, the caching of an enormous number of piñon seeds enables earlier nesting. In the southern reaches of the Pinyon Jay’s range, where severe drought has caused mass piñon pine die-off, jays are forced to adapt. They are “making do to get by,” Wickersham muses. It gives her some hope that they can adapt at all.

 

Pinyon Jays, the research increasingly shows, require a diverse landscape within their piñon–juniper habitat. Their gregarious nature cannot be separated from their food source, and thus their survival. Every one of their cooperative behaviors, perhaps most especially their breeding cycle, is a result of co-evolution with the piñon pine. While some researchers have noted the Pinyon Jay’s ability to somewhat adapt and adjust food sources, the increased pressures on Pinyon Jay habitat undeniably stress Pinyon Jay populations.

The decline of this highly cooperative species has stimulated a new level of teamwork among agencies and wildlife biologists. Though many questions remain, we know more about Pinyon Jays today than ever before, thanks to increased interest, research, and partnerships over the past decade. It is a striking example of how humans, too, flock and band together for a common cause. If there is hope for the Pinyon Jay and the planet at large, perhaps it will be in awakening our powers of collaboration and care for the species and environments we cannot stand to lose.

 

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to John Marzluff, Amy Seglund, Emily Macklin, Scott Gibson, and Lynn Wickersham for their dedication to understanding and conserving Pinyon Jays and for generously sharing their research and expertise. This article in no way represents all the research past or present regarding Pinyon Jays. In particular, I would be remiss in not mentioning the work of Great Basin Bird Observatory (GBBO), which has been tracking and studying Pinyon Jays in Nevada since 2008. Though this article focused on research in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, readers can learn more about GBBO’s Nevada-based research at gbbo.org/pinyon-jay-research.