By Gary Swant
On Aug. 22, 1805, William Clark, while floating the Salmon River in what is now Idaho, noticed a bird that had not yet been described in North America. He wrote in his journal, "I saw today [a] Bird of the woodpecker kind which feeds on Pine Purs its tale white the wings black every other part." On May 28, 1806 he further describes the bird and corrects his first report. "I have killed several birds of the corvus genus of a kind found only in the rocky mountains and neighborhood. [it] has a loud squawling note, - the beak of this bird is 1½ inches long."
By his second entry he realizes that the bird is not a woodpecker but is of the corvus or crow family. His May 28 entry goes on to describes the bird in detail. He names it Clark's crow.
Clark's nutcracker (Gary Swant) |
Clark's nutcracker is a member of the crow family of which there are 19 species in North America and nine species in Montana. I have seen seven of those nine species in the Upper Clark Fork River drainage. The two I have not seen locally are the pinyon jay and western scrub jay. The pinyon jay is mostly found in southeast Montana, but can be found in the Helena area as well. The scrub jay has been seen only once in the last decade. The other corvids are common and include gray jay, Steller's Jay, blue jay, black-billed magpie, American crow, and common raven. Of the seven seen in our valley, all breed locally, except the blue jay, which is infrequent and transient.
The habitat requirements of the Clark's nutcracker are coniferous forests, especially where there are lodgepole, ponderosa, pinyon and white-bark pines. This habitat is also occupied by the gray jay and Steller's jay and they co-habit without undue competition for food.
All jays are noisy songsters, but I hear the Clark's more often than gray or Stellar's. Their call is a long, ascending harsh trilled snarl - "rrrrrah." Once you hear the call and see the bird, it is one of those calls that is not forgotten. This jay is crestless and has a bold black, white, and gray pattern. Specifically the body is pale gray, with a white face. Wings are black, with small white patches. The tail is black with white outer tail feathers. The vent area is also white. The large bill is black as well as the legs and feet. It is a species of concern and is declining in numbers across the west. This decline is probably due to the decreasing pine densities due to disease and pine bark beetles. Although Clark's eat a lot of pine seeds they also store seeds in the ground in caches of 5 to 15 seeds. Research shows that a single bird can cache up to a 100,000 seeds in a good seed crop year. Even though, they have excellent long-term memory not all seeds cached are eaten. Through this caching and over-storing of pine seeds, seedlings are distributed across mountain habitats, and the plants the nutcracker are dependent upon our perpetuated.
Whitebark Pine is totally dependent on the nutcracker for seed dispersal. These two species are dependent enough on each other for survival and the behavior is called Whitebark Pine/Clark's Nutcracker Mutualism.
Gray jay (Gary Swant) |
Both species are year around residents and common in proper habitat. On your next trip to a coniferous forest, see if you can find both species and distinguish the difference.
- Gary Swant lives in Deer Lodge, Mont. and taught biological sciences at Powell County High School for 25 years. After retirement he founded GoBirdMontana LLC, an environmental consulting and bird guide service. He can be reached via e-mail at birdmontana1@hughes.net
Reprinted with permission. This article first appeared in the October 3, 2013 edition of the Montana Standard's Outdoor page.
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