52 SIGNS AND SEASONS 



minutes each trip. The hunters lay in wait to 

 shoot him, but so quickly would he seize his chest- 

 nut and be off, that he made more than a dozen 

 trips before they killed him. 



A lady writing to me from Iowa says : " I must 

 tell you what I saw a blue jay do last winter. 

 Flying down to the ground in front of the house, 

 he put something in the dead grass, drawing the 

 grass over it, first on one side, then on the other, 

 tramped it down just exactly as a squirrel would, 

 then walked around the spot, examining it to see 

 if it was satisfactory. After he had flown away, I 

 went out to see what he had hidden; it was a nicely 

 shucked peanut that he had laid up for a time of 

 scarcity. " Since then I have myself made similar 

 observations. I have several times seen jays carry 

 off chestnuts and hide them here and there upon 

 the ground. They put only one in a place, and 

 covered it up with grass or leaves. Instead, there- 

 fore, of hoarding up nuts for future use, when the 

 jay carries them off, he is really planting them. 

 When the snows come these nuts are lost to him, 

 even if he remembered the hundreds of places where 

 he had dropped them. May not this fact account 

 in a measure for the oak and chestnut trees that 

 spring up where a pine forest has been cleared from 

 the ground? Probably the crows secrete nuts in 

 the same way. The acorns at least germinate and 

 remain small, insignificant shoots until the pine is 

 cut away and they have a chance. In almost any 

 pine wood these baby oaks may be seen scattered 



