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Spotted Nutcracker

Spotted Nutcracker

Nucifraga caryocatactes

Identify the Spotted Nutcracker by sound or photo and log your sightings with Birdpass.

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The Spotted Nutcracker is a sturdy, chocolate-brown, white-spotted crow of the conifer forests of Eurasia. With its strong, dagger-like bill it harvests and stores large pine seeds and hazelnuts, and the seeds it fails to retrieve help new pines take root. Pairs bond for life and breed early, timing nesting to the stores cached the previous autumn. Usually sedentary, it can irrupt far from home when cone crops fail.

Did you know?

  • Its tongue ends in a tiny fork that helps it handle conifer seeds.
  • By caching pine seeds, it has helped re-establish Swiss pine in parts of the Alps.

Voice

Call

About the species

Identification

A sturdy, straight-billed crow the size of a Jay. It is dark brown, densely spotted with white all over; the wings and tail are dark. The undertail coverts are clearly white and the tail feathers broadly tipped white. The call is a harsh, Raven-like rasping. Told from Jay by its uniform brown, white-spotted plumage and white vent.

Family

Corvidae

Size

Medium (thrush)

Colours

brown, white, black

About the habitat

Boreal taiga and other conifer-dominated forests, especially spruce and pine, and mountain conifer woods such as in the Alps and Carpathians; in autumn also parks and gardens with hazel.

Diet

Mainly seeds of stone pines such as Swiss and Siberian pine, as well as spruce seeds, hazelnuts, acorns and berries; also insects, bumblebee and wasp larvae, small vertebrates, eggs and carrion.

Behaviour

Usually seen singly or in pairs, giving loud, harsh, rattling calls. It carries dozens of seeds at a time in a throat pouch and caches thousands for winter, relocating them by memory even under snow. Pairs nest early in spring; both parents feed the young, which stay with them for months, learning to store food. In poor cone years it may wander widely.

Sources

Photo: kuhnmi, CC BY 2.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nucifraga caryocatactes Davos 1.jpg

Sound: Zdeněk Vermouzek, XC249299, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://xeno-canto.org/249299

Text: Wikipedia (English) + FinBIF species descriptions, CC BY-SA 4.0; FinBIF: CC BY 4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_nutcracker

See also