"What kind of bird is that?" is a frequent question asked by people at Carson Pass. The trip from Frog Lake to Lake Winnemucca is a prime area to see (and certainly hear) the amusing Clark's Nutcrackers, a nice looking gray bird with black wings and the distinctive calls of a member of the Corvid family (crows and jays). But the Nutcracker has an interesting talent...

What if you only had a few weeks to gather your groceries for most of the coming year? And how about if you had to run from the store with only a few bags at a time, hide them in a place that only you would find, then go back for more? And now add the fact that you had to remember exactly where each of those grocery stashes had been put—and do it without any map, relying simply on your amazing ability to recognize specific surroundings months later?

According to Ron Lanner, author of both Made for Each Other and Conifers of California,* that's how the Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) works to stockpile the pine nuts that will keep it alive through the winter, the spring, the summer, and until the next harvest.

There is a fascinating symbiotic relationship between the Nutcrackers and what Ron calls "stone pines", pines with seeds lacking wings for dispersal. In our neck of the woods that would be the Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), a tree from the sub-alpine zone (8000'+) that develops cones that don't open, and seeds that don't fly even if the cones did open!

So if you're a Whitebark pine? How do you suppose you manage to get some regeneration happening when your cones don't open on their own? You just stick your cone-bearing branches up in the air and provide a handy perch for the neighborhood Nutcrackers to stop by. The big gray birds can grab onto the upright branches and enjoy a pine cone pig-out. Not only have they learned to chop open the cones, they have developed a handy storage pouch under their tongue so that they can carry a number of pine seeds when they fly off to poke them into the ground, hiding them for future meals. Since the cones aren't ready until very late summer, the Nutcrackers do have to gather and hide a supply of nuts that will last until the next harvest. Some years the crop is minimal and the birds can end up needing to search for other areas where for pine nuts of a different kind, able to substitute if the need arises.

But what about finding the stashes later? Can a bird actually remember where the seeds were cached? Yes! Experiments have shown that while a bird might sometimes find a cache left by another, they have learned to recover their own stashes by finding specific landmarks, then triangulating to find a midpoint and the cache! In a test, birds stashed nuts in a space between two sticks. When one of the sticks was moved, the returning bird was confused, digging in a new midpoint where no seeds were located; on the other hand, if the stick was moved AND the seeds moved to the new midpoint, the bird found the seeds right away. It was concluded that the Clark's Nutcracker remembers thousands of locations, even capable of finding a location covered by several feet of snow.

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