Clark's Nutcracker in Rocky Mountain National Park Poster

"Clark's Nutcracker in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado" by Catherine Sherman. A Clark's Nutcracker, a grey bird with black markings that can reach up to 11.3 inches in length, stands atop the bright green branches of a pine tree adorned with numerous greenish brown cones. The alert bird gazes skyward, ready to fly to its next meal on another branch in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. Clark's nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana), sometimes referred to as Clark's crow or woodpecker crow, is a passerine (perching) bird in the family Corvidae (Crow), native to the mountains of western North America. The nutcracker is an omnivore, but subsists mainly on pine nuts, burying seeds in the ground in the summer and then retrieving them in the winter by memory. The bird was described by the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with William Clark first observing it in 1805 along the banks of the Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia River. Clark's nutcrackers store seeds, usually in the ground to eat later, in caches of 1–15 seeds (average of 3–4 seeds) Depending on the cone crop as well as the tree species, a single Clark's nutcracker can cache as many as 98,000 seeds per season, more than it needs in case some of the seeds are stolen by other animals. Some of the buried pine seeds germinate, perpetuating the bird's food source. Closely tied in with this storage behaviour is the bird's remarkable long-term spatial memory.