8 BULLETIN 191, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



hunting apparently for grasshoppers, often going out into the fields several 

 hundred yards. * * * For about two weeks we fed them generously with all 

 sorts of refuse from our table, placing this in one spot. After they had become 

 accustomed to our presence, they spent the greater part of each day in carrying 

 food back into the woods, coming sometimes together, but usually alternately 

 every two or three minutes, filling their throats and bills to the utmost capacity, 

 then by short flights, passing out of sight. They seemed to prefer baked beans 

 to any other food which we had to offer them, and next to beans, oatmeal. They 

 would take bread or cracker when nothing else offered, carrying pieces of large 

 size in their bills, after having stuffed their throats with smaller fragments. They 

 did not seem to care for meat when the things just mentioned could be had. Of 

 baked beans they regularly took four at one load, three in the throat and one held 

 in the bill. * * * 



We spent the greater part of one day in following them in order to ascertain 

 what they did with the great quantity of food which they carried off. * * * They 

 took it various distances and to various places, rarely or never, so far as we 

 could ascertain, depositing two loads in the same place. They would place a 

 mouthful of oatmeal perhaps on the horizontal branch of a large hemlock, three 

 or four crumbs of bread on the crotch of a dead stub, a large piece of bread on 

 the imbricated twigs of a living fir. On one occasion we saw one deposit four 

 beans carefully on the top of an old squirrel's nest. 



On another occasion they found two of their storehouses : "One in 

 the top of a pine stub where a piece of wood was started off at angle 

 contained about a pint of bisquit and brownbread. The other in a larch 

 stub in three peck holes of either Colaptes or Hylotomus, the three holes 

 all crammed full of bread packed tightly, in all nearly a quart." As soon 

 as these latter birds learned that their storehouse had been discovered, 

 they immediately removed every vestige of the food. 



During spring, summer, and fall, this jay is largely insectivorous, feed- 

 ing on grasshoppers, wasps, bees, and various other insects and their 

 larvae. Mr. Warren (1899) saw them gathering "grubs from floating 

 logs" and says he has "often seen them chasing a Woodpecker away 

 from the trees just when he had uncovered the worm he had worked so 

 hard to dig out." 



W. H. Moore (1904) dissected a Canada jay "and was much sur- 

 prised to find that nearly one thousand eggs of the Lorset tent-caterpillar 

 had been taken for breakfast. The chrysalids of this caterpillar are also 

 fed upon, and in the autumn while the birds are migrating south they 

 feed largely upon locusts, beetles, etc. The young taken in June feed 

 upon beetles and caterpillars." 



Nuttall (1832) says that it "lays up stores of berries in hollow trees 

 for winter ; and at times, with the Rein-deer, is driven to the necessity of 

 feeding on Lichens." Audubon (1842) reports that "the contents of the 

 stomach of both young and old birds were insects, leaves of fir trees, and 

 eggs of ants." 



