Birds · Passeriformes · Corvidae

Clark's Nutcracker

Nucifraga columbiana

Least Concern

The species is abundant and widely distributed; it faces no significant short-term risk. See full glossary

Clark's nutcracker is a grey corvid with black and white wings, found in the high-altitude coniferous forests of western North America. Its whole life revolves around pine seeds: in autumn it collects tens of thousands of them and buries them in caches spread over kilometres of mountainside, which it later recovers beneath the snow with extraordinary spatial memory.

Weight

123 g – 137 g

Size

27 cm – 30 cm

Lifespan

17 years

Diet

Herbivore

Feeds mainly on plants.

Activity

Diurnal

Active mainly during the day.

Sighting difficulty

Easy

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Fun facts

It can bury more than thirty thousand pine seeds in a single autumn, spread across thousands of caches kilometres apart, and recover most of them months later beneath a metre of snow, guided by landmarks.
It has a sublingual pouch, a cavity beneath the tongue unique to its genus, in which it carries as many as a hundred pine seeds at once over several kilometres.
The whitebark pine depends almost entirely on it to reproduce: its seeds do not fly, and without the nutcracker's forgotten caches that high-altitude forest would not regenerate.

Life cycle & biology

Skeleton type: Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)
Habitat & environment: High-altitude coniferous forest of the Rockies and the Californian Sierra Nevada
Sexual maturity: 12 months
Gestation / incubation: 18 days
Litter / clutch size: 2.5 (average)

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucifraga_columbiana