Then it flies as much as 15 miles away, and drills the nuts into the ground in sets of ten, placing a stone on top of the stash to mark the site. 

 

It goes back for more and more. Over the autumn, a single bird can bury 30,000 nuts across an area of 100 square miles. When the winter comes, it will manage to remember the location of a staggering 70% of these seeds, even when hidden beneath the snow. But as the Clark’s Nutcracker remembers its way into surviving the winter, it becomes the whitebark’s greatest ally. 

 

Although its feat of memory is extraordinary, for every thousand seeds it buries, it still forgets 300. From all those missed seeds carried far and wide across Yellowstone, new whitebark pines will germinate next spring.