PINYON JAY Lucy Cooke on the highly competitive ‘queens’ of a complex bird society
Cultural bias can seriously obscure the way scientists interpret the animal world. Take the pinyon jay (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus). These cobalt-blue members of the crow family live in noisy flocks of 50 to 500 birds in western North America. Highly intelligent creatures with such active social lives are likely to have some kind of dominance network to order their society. John Marzluff and Russell Balda, who studied the jays for over 20 years, were interested in decoding this social hierarchy so they went in search of the ‘alpha male’.
This took some ingenuity. Male pinyon jays, it transpired, are committed pacifists. The enterprising ornithologists built feeding stations loaded with tasty treats to try and incite some kind of territorial war. But still the jays refused to fight. The researchers were forced to base their scale of combat on some fairly subtle cues, like sideways glances. If one male gave another what amounted to a dirty look, he might leave the feeder. It wasn’t exactly Game of Thrones stuff, but nevertheless the researchers diligently recorded around 2,500 of these ‘aggressive’ encounters.
When they came to run the statistics they were further confused. Only 14 of 200 flock members qualified for a place in the dominance network and there was no linear hierarchy. Males reversed their dominance and subordinates ‘aggressed’ their superiors.
Despite the puzzling results and general lack of macho hostility, the scientists still felt confident in declaring, “There is little doubt that adult males are in aggressive control.”
The curious thing is that the researchers had seen jays behaving with significantly more antagonism than a few annoyed looks. They documented birds in dramatic airborne battles where duelling pairs became locked in combat and “peck at each other
