Careful cachers and prying pilferers: Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) limit auditory information available to competitors

Food-storing corvids use many cache-protection and pilfering strategies. We tested whether Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) reduce the transfer of auditory information to a competitor when caching and pilfering. We gave jays a noisy and a quiet substrate to cache in. Compared with when alone, birds cached less in the noisy substrate when with a conspecific that could hear but could not see them caching. By contrast, jays did not change the amount cached in the noisy substrate when they were with a competitor that could see and hear them caching compared with when they were alone. Together, these results suggest that jays reduce auditory information during caching as a cache-protection strategy. By contrast, as pilferers, jays did not attempt to conceal their presence from a cacher and did not prefer a silent viewing perch over a noisy one when observing caching. However, birds vocalized less when watching caching compared with when they were alone, when they were watching a non-caching conspecific or when they were watching their own caches being pilfered. Pilfering jays may therefore attempt to suppress some types of auditory information. Our results raise the possibility that jays both understand and can attribute auditory perception to another individual.