Individuals differ in relative use of the 2 methods and in foot preference for holding seed. Also consumes ants at ant nests and searches for arthropods by flaking bark from trunks and prodding rotten logs and stumps. DIET Major food items. Conifer seeds are the primary food. Small mammals or carrion also fairly common food.
Storage begins when whole seeds with hard seed coats are extracted from cones.
Whitebark pine seeds stored as early as 15 Aug in Rocky Mtns. and 25 Aug in Sierra Nevada. Clark's Nutcracker with full sublingual pouch, used to transport seeds to cache sites. Drawing by Tony Angell. From Vander Wall and Balda 1977, Tomback 1978a, Hutchins and Lanner 1982, and Vander Wall 1988. More typical distances are from a few meters to a few kilometers.