Bird of the Day - Clark’s Nutcracker

Meet the Clark’s Nutcracker (four letter acronym CLNU). Found only in the Rocky Mountains, it’s name comes from William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition who were the first scientists to describe and collect this species. The Clark’s Nutcracker is a member of the Corvidae family that also contains ravens, crows, and magpies etc. They are one of the most common avian species on the Kelly Campus. They breed in cup nests, usually on horizontal branches of pine trees, and should be beginning to breed right now. Their diet is composed primarily of pine nuts but they are omnivorous and also eat arthropods when they are available and like most corvids, are regular nest robbers and will eat carrion.

They are probably best known for their caching of pine nuts and co-evolutionary relationship with limber, white-bark, and pinion pine trees that have wingless seeds and rely on Clark’s Nutcrackers and Pinion Jays to spread their seeds. Clark’s Nutcrackers (and Pinion Jays) will cache thousands (as many as 25,000 in a year) of pine seeds every summer and fall. They have a remarkable spatial memory and are able to remember where they cached most of those seeds and largely live off of them throughout the winter and spring. Those seeds that they do not recover germinate and grow into saplings. Without these birds, those tree species are otherwise ill equipped to spread their own seeds and a book has been written about this co-evolutionary relationship (Made for Each Other: A Symbiosis of Birds and Pines, by Ronald M. Lanner).

They are most likely to be mistaken for Black-billed Magpies who are similar sized but contain no grey color and poses a much longer tail. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Image of Clark’s Nutcracker from Patuxent Wildlife Research Center.