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Blue Jays Plant Oak Trees

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Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow.  Blue jays put  even the remarkably industrious Johnny Appleseed to shame when it comes to planting trees – oak trees that is. Several ornithologists watched a group of eastern blue jays for a month as they stored acorns for winter. After 28 days, these fifty birds had transported 150,000 nuts – that’s 110 acorns a day for each jay. For ease of planting, the jays most often chose soft moist soils – just the right conditions for good germination and growth.

Amazingly, the acorns selected by jays had a higher germination rate than acorns selected at random by the researchers themselves. This innate food storing behavior is so powerful that scientists believe that acorn planting by blue jays actually pushed the re-colonization of oaks to move back into northern states after the last ice age faster than it would have occurred without their intervention.

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Amanda McNulty is a Clemson University Extension Horticulture agent and the host of South Carolina ETV’s Making It Grow! gardening program. She studied horticulture at Clemson University as a non-traditional student. “I’m so fortunate that my early attempts at getting a degree got side tracked as I’m a lot better at getting dirty in the garden than practicing diplomacy!” McNulty also studied at South Carolina State University and earned a graduate degree in teaching there.