Jay Caching

Western scrub jay

Matthew 6:26a
"Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them."

A cat crouching at a mouse hole is already hunting. Until now, no animal has ever been observed actually planning for the future.

Recent studies of western scrub jays have now shown undeniable planning behavior by the jays. To see if the jays engaged in true planning, individual jays were moved into a special cage in the lab. It had a main room with two side rooms. A jay would be moved into one or the other of the side rooms every morning. One side room never offered food for the first two hours the bird was in it, while the other consistently offered food. After each bird learned this pattern, they were allowed into the main room in the evening to eat their fill. All of the eight test subjects also provided the no-breakfast side cage with generous caches of extra food, clearly in anticipation of the morning. In a second test, different food supplies were available in each side cage. When they were allowed to freely cache, they cached supplies of the missing food in each side room, again clearly anticipating the next morning.

God has provided for His creatures' needs by giving them the abilities they need to make their living. That includes giving seemingly advanced abilities to creatures that are supposedly far less evolved than we are.

Notes: Science News, 2/24/07, p. 117, S. Milius, "Bird Plans."
Photo: Courtesy of GreyStork. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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