The Clark's Nutcracker, which was named after the famous early 1800's explorer William Clark of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition, is a bird that is well known for being a seed eater. In fact many studies have been done on this species because it stores large amounts of pine seeds for later consumption. Much of the birds entire life is centered around finding, caching and retrieving the pine seeds from its cache.
Using a rather large pouch under its tongue, called a sublingual pouch, the nutcrackers collects seeds from White Bark Pine, Pinyon Pine and other evergreens and buries them in underground caches. They can fit up to a 100 pine seeds in their pouch at a time. Each bird can cache 20 to 50 thousand pine seeds per season. This is very important because the cache of seeds is what gets the birds through the rest of the year when the seeds are not available. What is remarkable about this is the birds remember where the stored seeds are even when the cache is buried under snow. Studies show that the birds remember the locations by the relationship to major landmarks such as large rocks and trees and have nearly total recall of all seed locations. In addition they also remember the size of the seeds that they buried at the location. So they can remember if the cache is composed of large or small seeds.
Other studies show that these birds are either "left" or "right-footed" when it comes to collecting, handling and storing the seeds. This means they are very similar to humans in our preference in using our right or left hand. They use their dominant foot to hold the cones while pry out the seeds and also use the same foot to help burry the cache of seeds.
They inhabit high-elevations where pines are the dominant tree and not many humans go. As a result these birds have little fear of people. They can be a fairly loud bird calling back and forth between family members communicating their wants and needs to each other.
Their main source of food is pine seeds. Using their long narrow bill to extract the seeds from the cones. They also forage on the ground finding insects during the warmer months and they are known for eating other birds eggs and babies too. But what is not really well documented is the behavior I saw and photographed.
While searching for a Short-tailed Weasel in a small tree lined field I saw some fluttering on the ground. I leveled my camera on the action and saw a Clark's Nutcracker tossing something in the air over and over. He was clearly trying to kill a vole. Once the vole was dispatched the bird flew up to a tree branch with the vole in its beak. I quickly drove down to get a closer look. For the next five minutes the nutcracker held the vole down with its feet and tore it apart swallowing it bit by bit.
I could see the bird didn't like some of the entrails and other parts and would discard these parts as if it knew exactly what it liked and didn't like. Obviously this bird had done this before. It wasn't long before it finished its meal and flew off into the woods. I thought now that is a behavior you don't see very often in these cool birds.
Geronimo
Uri Kolker
06-Dec-2010 14:36
Lions and tigers and bears oh my.
Did you get a momemt where a bird was pooping? Looks like he is a poopy bird.
