ST. GEORGE — Pinyon-juniper woodlands sprawl across Southern Utah and cover more land in the state than any other forest type. But the woodlands’ future could be uncertain as one seed-planting bird declines in numbers.

Biologists have become increasingly concerned about the West’s pinyon jay populations as standardized national surveys, such as the Breeding Bird Survey, have estimated an 85% decline since the 1960s, said Rachel Bolus, an associate professor of biology at Southern Utah University.

“Without intervention, the remaining population is expected to decline by an additional 50 percent by 2035, making it one of the fastest declining bird species in the United States,” The National Audubon Society states.

The species was listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources due to declining numbers and threats from farming and ranching, climate change, drought and habitat shifting or alteration, among others.

While pinyon jays are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, neither the bird nor its habitat have received additional protections. For this reason, the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the species under the Endangered Species Act in 2021.

The agency found protection may be warranted in August 2023 and began a 12-month status review of the species to make a final determination.

If the species is listed, more funding will be available to protect it, said Peggy Darr, the Defenders of Wildlife’s New Mexico representative.

“Federal land management agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, will have to consider the birds’ needs in all of their management actions,” she said.

A symbiotic relationship

Pinyon jays are corvids, a family of highly intelligent birds that includes crows, ravens, magpies and scrub jays. The species, Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus, is the only member of its genus, Darr said. Pinyon jays are a keystone species, meaning they significantly impact their environment.

The American Bird Conservancy described this “blue crow” as a gregarious crestless jay with bare nostrils. Unlike ravens, pinyon jays don’t have feathers covering their nostrils, allowing them to “probe sticky pine cones for seeds” with less risk of matted feathers.

They have a symbiotic relationship with pinyon pines, relying on pine nuts as one of their primary food sources, Darr said. But the trees don’t produce nuts every year.

In search of food, these nomadic birds wander — sometimes hundreds of miles — across a wide range encompassing 13 states, including Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, said the Western Watersheds Project’s California Director Laura Cunningham.

“They wander around the Great Basin areas to mountain ranges, looking for pinyon crops,” she told St. George News. “There’s no other jay that does this.”

They have expandable esophagi that can store 40-50 nuts at a time and can cache thousands of seeds per year. While they remember most of these locations, they occasionally forget and unintentionally plant new trees, Darr said. Jays are the primary planters of pinyon pine seeds.

“Without pinyon jays, we wouldn’t have the pinyon-juniper woodlands that we have today,” she said. “They would be significantly reduced.”

According to Audubon, multiple factors put the birds and trees at risk, including drought, insects and development. For instance, climate change-related conditions like higher temperatures and long-term drought have increased the number of bark beetle infestations, causing mass die-offs and decreasing seed production.

“Without ample food, Pinyon Jays forgo nesting, resulting in population declines. Without jays, the woodland may not be able to move into more habitable areas as the climate changes,” the nonprofit reports.

While some pinyon-juniper ecosystems face threats, the U.S. Forest Service stated in 2021 that this forest type is expanding, making it unclear why the jays are “rapidly vanishing.” But understanding how they use their habitat could be key.

“One hypothesis is that because of decades of fire suppression, pinyon-juniper woodlands are becoming denser, older, and less vigorous in terms of pine nut production,” the agency states.

Recent research using direct observation and radio telemetry found that, out of over 40 million acres of pinyon-juniper forest in the Great Basin region, pinyon jays appear to use only a small portion.

“The jays were found to be active mostly in the lower elevations with a diverse mosaic of young trees, older trees, and shrubs at the woodland-shrub ecotone (the area of transition where two vegetation communities merge),” according to the Forest Service.

Pinyon-juniper woodlands expand and contract naturally, depending on climate and weather-related factors, Darr said. In drier years, the forests may retreat.

In wetter years, more trees could grow, either infilling existing forests or moving outward, sometimes into grasslands and sagebrush steppes, inhabited by other at-risk species like greater sage-grouse. While not listed under the Endangered Species Act, the bird is considered one of Utah’s “species of greatest conservation need.”

“It’s a complicated matter,” Darr said. “In areas where sagebrush and grassland meet pinyon-juniper — that’s a tough area … where multiple species, including the pinyon jay, need to have all of their needs met.”

Sage grouse “completely avoid otherwise suitable habitat when only a few trees break up large expanses of sagebrush,” reports Working Lands for Wildlife, a program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service that works with researchers and ranchers on “voluntary, incentive-based” wildlife conservation.

There are management solutions that can help sustain both grouse and jays by planning conifer removal in areas least likely to impact pinyon jays, which is currently done in approximately 85% of projects, Working Lands states.

A 2023 study found that when jays were considered in models used to prioritize areas for conifer removal, there were “substantial shifts in the distribution” of these areas away from pinyon jay strongholds. For instance, areas mostly in Utah and Nevada considered most important to the species saw a “loss in priority.”

Southern Utah’s jays

The BLM’s Cedar City Field Office also clears pinyon-juniper habitat for livestock, big game and other species of concern, like sage grouse.

Additionally, Southern Utah’s populations are less studied than those in northern Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, prompting the BLM to contact Bolus to conduct additional research “to learn how clearing may be affecting pinyon jays who use this habitat and how we can better manage the land.”

The project is a collaborative effort with BLM wildlife biologist Derek Christensen. Participants conduct visual surveys of nests and nesting colonies and measure habitat characteristics, she explained.

They plan to attach satellite transmitters to some birds to learn more about their movements. Various field technicians have assisted, including 18 SUU students whom Bolus described as “integral to this project.”

Since the project began in 2021, they’ve found the birds “have done very little breeding in this area,” potentially due to drought, as the species avoids reproducing in poor conditions. However, there was a notable exception.

“This fall, I noticed that a flock that I have regularly seen had increased in size,” she said. “Usually, I see 30-100 birds in this flock, but this time, we saw 370. I suspect they did some breeding later than usual this year, as they eat pine nuts and large insects like grasshoppers, and we finally had more of both this summer.”

In 2018, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Colorado Parks and Wildlife to develop survey methodologies to better understand where pinyon jays are and how they’re faring, said DWR Wildlife Conservation Biologist Scott Gibson. They began work in 2019, surveying the species in grid cells about 10 square kilometers in size, and found approximately 60 breeding colonies in Utah over the last three years.

Instead of counting individual birds, surveyors determined if any pinyon jays were present in each grid cell they visited, so Gibson said he’s hesitant to use the results to make statements about how the species is faring in Utah overall.

“What I can say is that we were pretty effective at finding jays in a wide variety of geographical locations across the state,” he said. “And we found them oftentimes where we would expect to find them. … That information is going to be critical, hopefully, as we can continue to monitor them over time and hopefully get better trend data.”

Still, Gibson offered some “good news.”

“We are at the core of their range, and we do know that there are still a lot of jays on the landscape in Utah,” he said. “So, we’re finding them pretty regularly. Whether or not those numbers are what they used to be in the past — it’s hard for us to say.”

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