ON A CLOUDY MARCH MORNing in the Cascade Mountains of central Washington State, Taza Schaming has gotten her hopes up once again. She flew in late last night from her home in upstate New York and woke early to drive two hours to a trailhead outside the town of Wenatchee, but she’s upbeat as she straps her snowshoes to her pack. Her goal sounds simple enough: capture six Clark’s Nutcrackers and fit them with satellite tracking tags. But Schaming, a wildlife ecologist with the nonprofit Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, has failed twice to trap the sleek gray corvids on these rocky slopes. The first time, in March 2020, pandemic shutdowns forced her to turn around before she made it to Washington. In 2022 she spent days trekking to remote bait stations where she’d heard the birds had been spotted but came up empty. “Hopefully three times is the charm,” she says.
She’s back with a fresh determination to succeed—and well aware of what’s at stake. The Clark’s Nutcracker’s life is closely intertwined with that of whitebark pine, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed as threatened in 2022 under the Endangered Species Act. Scientists had already been alarmed by the decline of the conifer—its existence underpins this entire subalpine ecosystem—and have been doing what they can to conserve and restore it. But these efforts could be for naught without nutcrackers. The stark, scraggly conifers depend primarily on nutcrackers to disperse their seeds, which the birds collect and cache for winter. If the birds don’t keep sowing new trees across the vast landscape, the whole ecosystem could falter. And while nutcracker populations appear to be healthy, the further decline of their preferred food could spell trouble in the coming years.
The satellite tags Schaming is keen
