Which bird is known to hide thousands of food caches and remember them?

Which bird is known to hide thousands of food caches and remember them? Clark's nutcracker is the answer. This mountain-dwelling corvid stores pine seeds in scattered underground caches and later recovers them, even beneath snow.

A single bird can cache as many as 98,000 seeds in one season, usually placing one to 15 seeds at each site. Its expandable sublingual pouch can carry roughly 50 to 150 seeds, allowing it to transport a large load before making many separate deposits.

The nutcracker's remarkable spatial memory helps it relocate caches for up to nine months. It tends to choose sites such as steep, south-facing slopes where snow melts earlier. Not every seed is recovered; forgotten seeds can germinate and help regenerate whitebark and other high-altitude pine forests.

Gray squirrels and acorn woodpeckers also store food, and blue jays cache seeds too, but Clark's nutcracker is especially famous for the scale of its caching and its highly accurate spatial memory.