Like the gray jay, the Clark’s nutcracker caches food when food is available. These cached seeds are the nutcracker’s main food source until the … They can even still find their caches under deep snow. Clark's Nutcracker Cache (GC5GN90) was created by Sgtmac1 on 11/17/2014. High in the mountains of the West, gray-and-black Clark’s Nutcrackers swoop among wizened pine trees, flashing white in the tail and wing. Clark’s nutcrackers are hoarders. They bury the high-calorie seeds, tens of thousands of them, in small caches for the winter. Teresa Lorenz. Caches are generally buried in the soil on exposed slopes. With a diet consisting mostly of conifer seeds, a Clark’s nutcracker caches between 35,000 to 98,000 seeds between late summer and fall. ), as well as an obligate coevolved mutualist of Whitebark Pine (P. albicaulis). Caches contain typically 1-15 seeds; a single nutcracker may cache as many as 35,000-98,000 pine seeds in late summer and fall. Clark's nutcracker plucking whitebark pine seeds from a cone. They’ll cache 2-4 seeds in each location, meaning they’ll remember approximately 20,000 different seed locations. With their dagger-like bills, these birds jab into pine cones and harvest their seeds, storing up to 150 of them in pouches under their tongues. Whitebark pine seedlings sprout almost exclusively from Clark's nutcracker seed caches. Abstract. They are… Seeds remain there until the nutcracker can bury them, 3 to 5 seeds at a time, in dispersed caches, often many miles away from the original tree. Clark’s Nutcracker has been observed flying directly to cache sites and digging through deep snow, even pecking through ice, to retrieve seeds that it had hidden eight to ten months earlier. A Clark’s nutcracker will cache on the order of 50 to 80,000 seeds each autumn, and return to them over the course of the winter. That’s an amazing memory! It's a Regular size geocache, with difficulty of 4, terrain of 4. Introduction When a bird actively memorizes thousands of sites where it stores tiny seeds in a vast forest, one could imagine it is like finding a needle in a haystack. Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) is one of the most specialized scatter-hoarding birds, considered a seed disperser for four species of pines (Pinus spp. Throughout the winter and spring, the nutcracker revisits these caches to … A single bird may make up to 20,000 caches a year! These birds can find their caches up to nine months later. Clark's Nutcrackers have excellent spatial memory, which enables them to cache up to 33,000 seeds in the fall, and then locate a large percentage of those during the winter. Scientists estimate that it will relocate up to two-thirds of seeds that it cached up to 13 months earlier. Scatter caching is to place something in storage to retrieve later, and Clark’s nutcrackers are remarkable at demonstrating this behavior consistently throughout studies. 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