Wednesday, 17 April 2024
Presenter: Dan Strickland
The Canada Jay, the iconic “whiskeyjack” of the north woods, is famous for dispensing with migration and living its entire life on year-round territories in the boreal and subalpine forests of North America, including in every province and territory in Canada and right up to tree line from Alaska to Newfoundland. What is less well-known is that the Canada Jay comes in three distinct varieties, and the one we have on the West Coast, including here on Vancouver Island, was once considered to be a separate species.
In this presentation, Dan Strickland, who studied Canada Jays for many decades in Algonquin Park, Ontario and has been studying the jays of Vancouver Island since 2016, will show you how distinct the Pacific form is from its eastern counterpart. The physical differences, while certainly visible, are minor compared to the dramatically different social behaviours of the two races. This raises the question of whether the two forms should be considered to be, not just well-marked races, but once again, as quite separate species!
Speaker Biography:
Beginning in the 1970s, as a sideline from his official duties as Chief Park Naturalist of Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Dan Strickland almost single-handedly did research on our unofficial national bird, the Canada Jay (formerly known as the Gray Jay). Dan continued his work after his retirement in 2000 and, in 2010 began to collaborate with Dr. Ryan Norris at the U. of Guelph. A number of M.Sc. and Ph.D students have earned their degrees based on the Algonquin study, now in its 56th year and one of the longest running studies of a vertebrate anywhere in the world.
In 2016 the presence of the extra manpower in Algonquin allowed Dan to begin a brand new study of the very different Pacific race of the Canada Jay at Paradise Meadows on Mount Washington. The new study, now in its 8th year, has benefitted for several years from the involvement of geneticists, Dr. Theresa Burg a recent post-doctoral student, Brendan Graham, at the University of Lethbridge. More recently Dr. John Reynolds and Dr. David Green of Simon Fraser University have also joined the team and, as of this past November, Dan has become a full-time resident of Vancouver Island in order to study the very different Pacific jays all year round.
