Scatter caching is to place something in storage to retrieve later, and Clark’s nutcrackers are remarkable at demonstrating this behavior consistently throughout studies. They bury the high-calorie seeds, tens of thousands of them, in small caches for the winter. A single bird may make up to 20,000 caches a year! 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. They use their dagger-like bills to rip into pine cones and pull out large seeds, which they stash in a pouch under their tongue and then carry away to bury for the winter. That’s an amazing memory! 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. It's located in Washington, United States.This cache is one in a series of birding related caches I am hiding in advance of the Washington State Audubon Society Campout at Wenas Campground, Memorial Day 2015. Whitebark pine seedlings sprout almost exclusively from Clark's nutcracker seed caches. It's a Regular size geocache, with difficulty of 4, terrain of 4. These cached seeds are the nutcracker’s main food source until the … Clark’s nutcrackers are hoarders. Clark's Nutcracker Cache (GC5GN90) was created by Sgtmac1 on 11/17/2014. Scientists estimate that it will relocate up to two-thirds of seeds that it cached up to 13 months earlier. They’ll cache 2-4 seeds in each location, meaning they’ll remember approximately 20,000 different seed locations. 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. Teresa Lorenz. 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. They can even still find their caches under deep snow. 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. Throughout the winter and spring, the nutcracker revisits these caches to … 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. 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. Caches are generally buried in the soil on exposed slopes. These birds can find their caches up to nine months later. 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. Abstract. 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