MAGPIES, JAYS, CROWS: CLARK NUTCRACKER 
503 
Food. —In summer, the nut-like seeds of the timberline foxtail pines, cedar 
berries, beetles, hairless tree caterpillars, ants, aerial insects, grasshoppers, and the 
destructive black cricket; in fall and winter, pinyon nuts and seeds of yellow pine 
and other conifers. The young are fed by regurgitation on hulled pine seeds. 
General Habits. —When walking about before you in crow-like 
pose, the Clark Crow or Nutcracker with his sharply contrasted 
plumage seems the most conspicuous and striking of birds, but, as 
Doctor Merriam has pointed out, this coloration is both protective and 
directive; for his colors “put on in blocks,” are “ruptive,” and when he 
is quietly feeding on the ground among the gray rocks, destroy the bird 
form, the gray of the plumage toning in with the gray of the rocks, the 
black with the dark shadows. Most especially is this protective at 
night, when the bird is roosting in trees exposed to owls and martens, 
for as Doctor Merriam says, “contrasts of gray or white with black are 
among the most effective of disappearing colors at night, the black 
resembling patches of night shadow, the gray, the interspaces” (1899, 
p. 121). 
In the high forested mountains the trim Nutcrackers come about 
camp with the fluffy Rocky Mountain Jays, but while the Jays retreat 
to the protecting depths of the dense Hudsonian forest, the Nut¬ 
crackers fly up into the open, among the wind-beaten dwarfs of timber- 
line. When wanting to descend from these heights, a Nutcracker will 
sometimes make what James A. Neilson has called his “wonderful 
plunge flight.” One that he saw come up over the top of Laramie 
Peak in Wyoming, “while yet a thousand feet or more above the valley 
floor, nose-dived almost to the ground, when he turned upward to check 
his speed, causing a plainly audible roar of wings” (1926, p. 101). 
At our 11,000-foot camp below Pecos Baldy in August, 1903, 
only a few Clark Crows came into the tree tops, but at our 11,600-foot 
camp, where the rocky side of the peak rose 1,000 feet above us, and 
on up to the top of the peak, they were seen commonly, their loud, 
stirring fcarVr, fcarVr, resounding through the clear mountain air. 
And here it is that I like best to remember them, for the brave moun¬ 
taineers seem fitting familiars of the cliffs of the upper reaches. 
At camp where they came for food with the Rocky Mountain 
Canada Jays, they were not nearly so tame as the Jays, although they 
would come within two or three rods of us, walking around solemnly 
like Crows, helping themselves freely to food thrown out for them. They 
fed with the Camp Birds quite peaceably for the most part, but one of 
them was seen chasing a Jay which had food in its bill, and the Jays 
usually got out of the way when they found themselves too obviously 
in it. Well they might, for one of the masterful Clark Crows has 
been seen chasing a Golden Eagle. Before the nuts and conifer seeds 
ripen, the Nutcrackers live largely on insects. Two were seen near 
