By Susan Milius
Should humanity get a little too full of itself and its intellectual prowess, there’s always Clark’s nutcracker to think about. This pale-gray bird with black wings and a long beak flits through woodlands in the West, collecting seeds during times of plenty and tucking them away for a hungry winter’s day. During a year, each bird buries 22,000 to 33,000 seeds in up to 2,500 locations, and scientists estimate that the bird recovers two-thirds of them up to 13 months later.
Just how seed cachers do this has fascinated biologists for decades. Scientific investigation of the topic has broadened and deepened in recent years. Cognitive scientists pose seed-storage puzzles to birds as a way of sorting out how their brains work and might resemble our own. Ecologists are looking for links between seed-caching powers and the perils of a species’ environment.