Clarks Nutcrackers are fairly common in Yellowstone(and the Western United States). They cache pine cone seeds during the fall months for food during the coming winter. They apparently have excellent memories and can find their food caches through several feet of snow cover. As they seldom consume all of the seeds they cache it is likely that they are the major "planter" of Whitebark Pine trees. To avoid confusing the nutcracker with the Gray or Canadian Jay look for the white under the tail and the white flash on the wings during flight. Lewis and Clark Expedition----The Corps of Discovery first saw this bird "on the heights of the rocky mountains" while camped with the Shoshone Indians near Idaho's Lemhi River. The Clark's nutcracker may have an even better mapping ability than Captain Clark, its namesake. A hoarder of whitebark pine nuts, the nutcracker can locate as many as 2,000 different caches up to eight months after it buried them. Still, it misses some, which germinate and grow. Unfortunately, blister rust is killing off whitebark pines, depriving Clark's nutcrackers of a primary food source. WHAT IS THE CORP OF DISCOVERY???? When Thomas Jefferson sent young Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery to survey the lands beyond the Mississippi, the West was terra incognita. Some believed the explorers would encounter mountains of salt, woolly mammoths, seven-foot beavers, or Welsh-speaking Indians. Jefferson's aims for the expedition were partly political (the United States having only recently acquired the territory from a cash-strapped Napoleon Bonaparte), partly practical (to see if one could get to the Pacific by boat), but also scientific: He wanted to know just what was out there. Lewis and Clark were a few millennia too late for Pleistocene megafauna, but they were privileged to witness a glorious, diverse ecosystem in full flower. "This scenery already rich, pleasing and beautiful," Lewis wrote near the White River in South Dakota on September 17, 1804, "was still farther hightened by immence herds of buffaloe, deer elk and antelopes which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of buffaloe which could be compre[hend]ed at one view to amount to 3,000." Within a very few years, it would all be swept away. The destruction came in five epic waves: the near eradication of the North American bison; the plowing under of native grasslands for crop cultivation; the decimation of wolves, bears, beavers, and other fur-bearing animals by trappers and bounty hunters; the advent of industrial logging; and the collapse of the great salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest caused by commercial fishing, dams, and development. No sooner had Lewis and Clark embarked in the spring of 1804 than they began writing what were to become epitaphs. When they crossed the Kansas River, Clark described encountering a large flock of "Parrot queets," now thought to be the handsome, bright green and yellow Carolina parakeet, the last of which died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918. On July 5, 1806, Lewis noted "a great number of pigeons breeding in this part of the mountains." Seven years later, John James Audubon claimed to have beheld over Kentucky a flock of passenger pigeons a mile wide that took three days to pass. They flew at the rate, he calculated, of more than 300 million birds per hour; the storm of their flapping wings was said to be heard six miles away. In 1914, the last passenger pigeon (named Martha) passed away, also at the Cincinnati Zoo. That such numbers could dwindle to nothing so swiftly is a harsh lesson in population dynamics. Equally remarkable is that most species have hung on. Some are still in great peril, while others have staged astonishing comebacks. The key is habitat: Restore it, and life returns. But where is the blueprint? Thanks to Jefferson's passion for natural science, Lewis and Clark left us with a description of "the soil and face of the country, it's growth and vegetable productions," as Jefferson put it, as well as "the animals of the country generally, and especially those not known in the U.S." With their careful, detailed accounts of 178 plants and 122 animals, Lewis and Clark gave us a guide to assessing-and restoring-ecological health.