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. Caches are generally buried in the soil on exposed slopes. 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. 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. These cached seeds are the nutcracker’s main food source until the … 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. They’ll cache 2-4 seeds in each location, meaning they’ll remember approximately 20,000 different seed locations. It's a Regular size geocache, with difficulty of 4, terrain of 4. With a diet consisting mostly of conifer seeds, a Clark’s nutcracker caches between 35,000 to 98,000 seeds between late summer and fall. Clark's Nutcracker Cache (GC5GN90) was created by Sgtmac1 on 11/17/2014. They can even still find their caches under deep snow. High in the mountains of the West, gray-and-black Clark’s Nutcrackers swoop among wizened pine trees, flashing white in the tail and wing. That’s an amazing memory! A single bird may make up to 20,000 caches a year! Whitebark pine seedlings sprout almost exclusively from Clark's nutcracker seed caches. 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. 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. Throughout the winter and spring, the nutcracker revisits these caches to … 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. 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. Clark's nutcracker plucking whitebark pine seeds from a cone. ), as well as an obligate coevolved mutualist of Whitebark Pine (P. albicaulis). These birds can find their caches up to nine months later. Clark's Nutcrackers have excellent spatial memory, which enables them to cache up to 33,000 seeds in the fall, and then locate a large percentage of those during the winter. 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 bury the high-calorie seeds, tens of thousands of them, in small caches for the winter. 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