Do you have trouble keeping track of your stuff? Can’t find your eyeglasses, the TV remote, or your car keys? And what about that special gift that you tucked away months ago in a safe place where it wouldn’t be discovered? That spot was so safe you can’t seem to re-discover it! You might sometimes feel like you’ve lost your marbles!
Just for grins, imagine hiding tens of thousands of marbles in roughly 5,000 places in a 15-square-mile area and having to find them all months later. How successful do you think you would be? Believe it or not, there’s a bird that is known to dig up roughly 3/4th of the seeds it buries in just such an area each year. Scientists believe they could dig up the other 25 percent if they really needed them. The astounding thing is that these birds' brains are smaller than the nuts they cache!
Clark’s nutcrackers are the winners of the memory game in the animal kingdom. These medium-sized gray birds are members of the corvid family, which includes crows and jays. They are a common site in Colorado’s montane forests and are often confused with another common corvid, the gray jay. Clark’s nutcracker has black wings, and black down the center of its tail. Its outer tail feathers and the underside of the tail are white, and it has white patches at the edges of its wings. The gray jay does not have white wing bars and outer tail feathers.
Clark's nutcracker has a long, sharp, black bill that is more down-turned on the end. This specialized bill is used to pry open thick pine cones to obtain the nuts inside. Nutcrackers collect seeds from early fall through December. They stuff the seeds into pouches below their tongues, and then may fly several miles and bury the seeds on east and south-facing slopes where winter snow will melt early. Some caches may contain as few as three or five nuts while others may contain 30 to 50. The birds conceal the seeds about one inch underground and cover them with dirt or gravel. To the human eye, these caches appear unmarked.
The survival of the piñon, limber, and white pines are as dependent on Clark's nutcrackers as the birds are on the trees’ seeds. Any nuts that aren't eaten have a good chance of sprouting new pines. It is thought that the birds keep the caches small to avoid theft from squirrels and bears. Not only do lots of smaller caches insure the birds against losing their food supply, it increases the chances that the seeds will be placed in a good growing location.
Nutcrackers have remarkable success recovering their seeds. They cache 25 percent more food than they need to survive the average winter. Like good boy scouts, they "are prepared" for a worst-case scenario—a longer or colder winter. The stored provisions enable the nutcracker to breed as early as January or February and feed its young with pine seeds. Since both sexes need to recover seeds, the male nutcracker develops a brood patch on its chest just like the female, and takes his turn incubating the eggs.