Found in western North America
 Hear Their Calls
Tis the season of the Nutcracker—the bird kind, that is. The Clark’s Nutcracker, a member of the Crow and Jay families, lives in the mountains of the West, flashing its white tail among the trees.
These gray-and-black birds do indeed love nuts and seeds; they can bury tens of thousands of pine seeds in fall to get them through the winter (seeds they leave behind are important for forest regrowth), and they pry open pine cones with their bills to extract seeds within. They also choose seeds by color, and prefer dark brown ones.
Fun fact: Male Nutcrackers incubate the mating pair’s speckled, pale green eggs while the female retrieves hidden seeds (the locations of which she remembers well) to feed them. |
