On an early spring morning at Archbold Biological Station in Central Florida, the ornithologist John Fitzpatrick lifts his binoculars to train his sights on a Florida scrub jay. Spotting the vivid blue-and-gray bird is not difficult: Two hop just in front of him, another studies him from a nearby branch, and one lands squarely on his head, peering out over the sugary white sand of an ecosystem as rare and endangered as the bird itself.
This is the monthly scrub jay census, when biologists count each of their three hundred or so subjects, all identifiable by a unique set of colored leg bands. The study of Archbold’s birds—among the most in-depth and long-standing of any bird, anywhere—began nearly sixty years ago.
Fitzpatrick himself joined the efforts in April 1972 as an intern while at Harvard, a formative experience that launched a career that included Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, a stint as Archbold’s director, and a twenty-six-year run leading the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. But all along, scrub jays were his constant, and it was here at Archbold that he first convened a group of colleagues to conceive e-Bird, a global data collective that fuels scientific discovery and powers the hugely popular Merlin birding app.
Today, as a markedly unretired retiree who snowbirds in Vero Beach, Fitzpatrick rarely skips a month counting at Archbold. He is familiar with virtually all the site’s scrub jays, plus their parents, and their parents’ parents, back fourteen generations. “We know so much about these jays that we even think we know what we don’t know,” he says.
As study species go, Florida scrub jays are a dream. They generally live their entire lives within about a thousand yards of where they hatch, and here at Archbold, where biologists at times wield peanuts in the name of science, they’re happy to come when called. Thanks to the decades researchers have spent observing the social structure of this small subset of Florida scrub jays acclimated to humans, the species has become one of the best understood examples of cooperative breeding in the animal kingdom: The birds live in extended family groups consisting of a breeding pair plus their children, called helpers, who aid in raising nests, watching for predators, and defending territory. If you were to describe it in human terms, explains Sahas Barve, the station’s current program director of avian ecology, a healthy population of the jays functions like a big neighborhood, where everybody knows everybody and residents rarely move away.
That homebody tendency gives away that this is a highly specialized species, evolved to thrive in a single habitat type: Florida oak scrub. Behind the inglorious name—Fitzpatrick suggests that the ecosystem should be called “elfin oak woodlands” instead—lies a fascinating geological story. Millions of years ago, before ice melt widened the literal gulf between Florida and the West, desert animals could move between the areas. Tortoises, snakes, lizards, birds of prey like the crested caracara, and the western scrub jay did so, and found familiar territory in Florida’s ancient dune ridges—deposits from Appalachia—which extended like sandy fingers down the center of the state. Then they got stuck there.
Over time, while the rest of Florida periodically marinated in a shallow sea, these ridges—high enough, at around a hundred feet, to elude the water—conducted business as usual, functioning as dry, fire-prone islands with their own special set of flora and fauna. “It’s like remnant strips of the West, stranded in the East,” Fitzpatrick says. Genetic analysis shows that the Florida scrub jay branched off from its western cousin an astounding two million years ago.
Fast-forward to today, and that same high ground is prime real estate. Only 5 percent of Florida oak scrub remains, the rest lost to a patchwork of citrus farms, houses, golf courses, theme parks, and cattle ranches. What’s left harbors some five hundred endemic species, found only here and almost all endangered. At best, about eight thousand scrub jays live statewide, less than a tenth of their historic numbers, with strongholds in Ocala National Forest, on Merritt Island, and here on the Lake Wales Ridge, where Fitzpatrick once stood alone in front of a bulldozer with a camcorder to protest development in an ultimately successful move to protect what little remained of the strip outside of Archbold.
Out in the field on census day, Barve stops his truck. He summons a family of jays by making a pshhh, pshhh noise, holds up an enticing peanut, and scans the landscape. “It’s hard to think of it like this, but we are standing in an ancient forest,” he says. Most of the plants are miniaturized and don’t reach far past his chest, including the five species of stunted oaks that provide the jays with their winter store of acorns. Instead, the growth primarily happens belowground; because of the frequent fires, investing in aboveground biomass proved over millennia to be a bad bet.
The importance of fire led to another major takeaway of the long-running jay study: Biologists now know that around three years after a burn, scrub jays will start to move in, and the landscape will be optimal for their habitat between seven and ten years postfire. By fifteen years, it’ll be overgrown and ready for cleansing flames to reset the game. Having that data means that the last bastions of the species—and the many others that benefit when the jay does, like sand skinks and gopher tortoises—can be properly managed with fire. Barve is turning his attention to the looming problem of climate change and how it may affect the birds; already, he’s documented that a warmer winter results in fewer successful fledglings the following spring.
Back at Archbold, after the team has trickled in from counting, everyone gathers for a scrub-jay roll call and gossip swap. Tomorrow the biologists will head back into the field to seek out the absent birds in what they call a mop-up—little points of data that, taken together with those from years past, paint a rare complete picture of a wild bird population.
“Even after studying these birds for over fifty years, I am still amazed by them,” Fitzpatrick says—amazed by their ingenuity and individual personalities; by the way they place a stick or lichen over where each of them buries their eight thousand acorns a year, as a memory hack. “They are clever beyond comprehension. They are truly unique in the American natural history landscape.”
