Deez nutcrackers

I am proud of another member of my family, one who can fly around and bury seeds and remember where they are buried!

There is this bird, see, a whole lot of them, sharing the name Clark's Nutcracker, and every fall, they round up as many as 98,000 pine seeds and bury them in about 5,000 little caches, 2 to 4 seeds per location.

Technically, they are passerine birds in the family Corvidae, native to the mountains of western North America. So they don't live around here, but they do send pretty pictures....

And then, they remember where they buried almost all of those seeds! They have a map in their tiny bird brains about where they left those snacks behind, meaning that no matter how cold and long the winter is, they remember their cache of seeds. Science knows that they use triangulation...measuring angles and distances between landscape features (rocks, big trees, fallen logs) to pinpoint the hiding places.

And get this! They intentionally over-cache, so there are seeds planted they will not need and will not return for, and a certain amount of those seeds will germinate and become new pine forests.

I mean, what could be better for nature than this? I am proud to be kin to these nutcrackers!