We think of ourselves as great tree planters, but a single group of blue jays was documented moving 133,000 acorns in one fall. They're foresters too. Researchers in Virginia watched jays work a stand of pin oaks through one season. The birds carried off 54% of the entire crop, one to five acorns at a time, stored in the throat and bill. They didn't drop them nearby. They flew them off and buried them one by one, pushed into soft ground and covered, often far from the parent tree. That's exactly how you'd plant an acorn if you were trying. A jay comes back for a lot of them. Not all of them. Every one it forgets is a tree planted somewhere a falling acorn could never reach. The acorns left under the parent oak mostly got eaten or ruined by weevils. The ones the jays moved got a chance. Some ecologists think jays help explain how oaks spread back north so fast after the last ice age, much faster than gravity and squirrels could manage. So leave the jays alone at the feeder. Protect the big oaks, plant native ones, and keep tree cover connected across yards and field edges. They're doing the planting. We just have to leave them somewhere to do it.