This spring, we’ve continued our work to capture and tag Clark’s Nutcrackers around Yellowstone National Park.

In 2020 the University of Colorado-Denver (UCD) and RCF attempted to capture Clark’s Nutcrackers in Yellowstone National Park. Our effort was interrupted when Covid shut down the park, but since then our work has developed into a multi-year project aimed at understanding movement patterns and habitat use of Clark’s Nutcrackers across the Yellowstone Ecosystem (YE). Since 2021, Ricketts Conservation Foundation staff have teamed up with UCD researchers to trap Nutcrackers in the park, from Mammoth Hot Springs, to the Lamar Valley, and south to Canyon Junction. We capture, band, and attach transmitters to individual Nutcrackers so that we can track their movements across the ecosystem in every season.

Our trapping approach remains straightforward and effective. Bait is deployed at selected sites and monitored over several days before traps are set. Steller’s Jays and Canada Jays frequently find the bait first, but once they arrive, we focus our efforts exclusively on nutcrackers. This year, we expanded our effort beyond park boundaries. We established new trapping sites in the Custer-Gallatin National Forest in Montana to expand our banding opportunities. This expansion is important, as the YE extends well beyond the park’s borders, and to understand nutcracker movement we need to sample across that broader landscape. This work proved successful, and we caught five individuals at one of our new locations.

In addition to capturing new individuals, we encountered birds that we trapped previously. Over the years, we have marked each captured bird with a unique color leg-band combination. This allows us to identify birds banded in the previous seasons and recapture individuals with old, non-functioning, transmitters. Upon recapturing these birds, we assessed their body condition and removed their units, reducing the load on the bird and allowing them to continue their lives unencumbered by the transmitter and harness. There’s something unique and special about releasing such a bird back into the wild after it carried a tag that contributed greatly to our understanding of its movements and habitat use.

With a new cohort of seven transmitters deployed in 2026, our project continues to build a growing dataset on annual nutcracker movement patterns and habitat use. As the dataset expands, so does our ability to better understand the ecological role of Clark’s Nutcrackers across the YE. Increasing our sample size will allow us to conduct more robust analyses of how these birds use the landscape and their primary food resource, the whitebark pine.

What first interested me about the Whitebark Pine wasn’t the tree at all. It was the Clarks Nutcracker. That little bird, I learned, has lived in a symbiotic partnership with the Whitebark Pine for millennia, distributing the tree’s seeds far and wide, and caching them every Fall as a food source during the winter and following Spring. And it’s those seeds from which we get new trees. It’s also those same, calorie-rich seeds that feed bears, red squirrels, and other species critical to a balanced and sustainable ecosystem. So with Whitebark Pine succumbing to blister rust, mountain pine beetles and climate change, the knock-on effects were far reaching. There are now more dead whitebark pines than live ones and in some places such as Glacier National Park, 90 percent of whitebark pines have died.

But my whitebark pine story is one of hope and restoration.

I first heard the story of the tree and the bird from Doug Smith, who at the time served as the Senior Wildlife Biologist at Yellowstone National Park. Doug introduced me to Diana Tomback, who has studied and advocated for these species for more than 30 years. Once I heard her describe how the birds and trees rely upon each other I knew it was a story that needed to be told. Raising awareness about this unique relationship, and the bigger issues facing the whitebark pine, was a critical step in helping to solve this crisis. This was exactly the type of issue for which I established the Ricketts Conservation Foundation.

In my mind, the most powerful way to tell a story is through film. Seeing and hearing a story brings it to life in a way few other things can. So I discussed the idea of documenting the Clarks Nutcracker and the Whitebark Pine story with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Center for Conservation Media. Working closely with the talented team at Cornell, we got to work on what proved to be a multi-year project, capturing footage that had literally never been seen before. One of the resulting films – Hope and Restoration: Saving the Whitebark Pine – is a vital way to sound the call for people to rally behind. A call to save this centuries-old relationship between a bird and a tree, and all the other animals and plants who depend on them.

We then approached American Forests to strategize and publicize this conservation crisis. American Forest’s CEO, Jad Daley, was, unsurprisingly, already familiar with the Whitebark crisis and identified the Whitebark Pine Restoration Plan as a priority.

Working together, we’re helping to get the word out, but it’s clear the movement needs more to be successful, including additional funding and people devoted to a restoration plan that uses the best available science and focuses on the highest priority areas to save.

As for the film, I’m glad we did it, and I hope it inspires more people to tell their own stories about this remarkable tree and even more remarkable bird.

Hope and Restoration is an official selection of the DC Environmental Film Festival, International Wildlife Film Festival and New York WILD Film Festival. To watch it and learn more about whitebark pine, go to https://savethewhitebarkpine.org