Laura Erickson's For the Birds

This splendid corvid, native to Western mountains, is the only bird named for William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. (Clark’s Grebe is named for John Henry Clark, a 19th century surveyor.) Like other corvids, Clark’s Nutcracker is omnivorous, but it focuses on pine seeds, caching away tens of thousands of them every summer. This is virtually always more than it can eat over the winter, but it stores (and remembers!) so many in order to compensate for losses from other animals, fires, downed trees, etc. Seeds that are left behind produce more pine trees.

William Clark apparently mistook the Clark’s Nutcracker specimen(s) collected on the expedition for a woodpecker. Clark’s Nutcracker differs from all other corvids in one unique way—the males, like the females, develop a brood patch and incubate their eggs.

Although Clark’s Nutcrackers are normally found in the mountains, they occasionally wander. The eBird map shows many sightings well beyond what a field guide range map would show. There have been at least 27 records in Minnesota. I saw one that turned up in Silver Bay on October 16, 2004, tragically before I was photographing birds.