As the sun was rising I was out walking the trails, birding, listening for sounds that helped me decide if I wanted to stop and look for the bird or keep walking. After being out there for over an hour I heard the calls of a Tree Swallow. The timing was right, they are back in the mountains. A minute later I saw two Tree Swallows in the air and a tree stump where their nest resided. As I stood watching the swallows a Clark’s Nutcracker came up onto a dead tree from the ground. I focused my eyes and my camera toward it and took its picture, then again when it perched top of the stump that contained the nest cavity of the swallows. The nutcracker went down to the cavity and started pulling on something. I thought, the swallows are not nesting yet, must be an insect or something related it was pulling on.
I put my camera on the nutcracker as it tried to pull on something again, That’s when I realized one of the swallow was in the nest, perhaps to do some spring cleaning. The nutcracker was trying to catch it. The nutcracker lost its hold, but some swallow’s features were pulled off. The swallow poked its head out of the nest and sent out a warning alarm, its mate responded and was circling and trying to get the much larger nutcracker to fly away. The nutcracker grabbed the swallow again and with some effort pulled it out, the swallow broke free but not before loosing more feathers. The swallow free from the nutcracker started flying in circles pursued by the nutcracker. Clark’s Nutcracker found in the mountains of the west, member of the Corvidae family, which include jays, crows, magpies and ravens. We associate it with eating pine seeds, does also eat insects, squirrels, chipmunks, voles, toads, carrion and birds. But that morning the bird it was trying to catch escaped to live another day.
