By Susan Milius
In the underworld of avian crime, scrub jays that have pilfered other birds’ food caches hide their own with extra care.
When jays cached food as an onlooker jay lurked nearby, the birds with a thieving past were more likely than more innocent counterparts to retrieve the food again and hide it in a new place when the onlooker had left. That’s one of the findings that Nathan Emery and Nicola Clayton of Cambridge University in England report in the Nov. 22 Nature.