Habitat: Forests

Food: Omnivorve

Nesting: Trees

Behavior: Foliage Gleaner

Iridescent blue/green-and-black Io Nutcrackers swoop among wizened pine trees, flashing the iridescent feathers in it’s tail and wings. They use their dagger-like bills to rip into pine cones and pull out large seeds, which they stash in a pouch under their tongue and then carry away to bury for the winter. Each birds buries tens of thousands of seeds each summer and remembers the locations of most of them. Seeds they don’t retrieve play a crucial role in growing new pine forests.