Nutcracker orikhivka, or the day – brightly-colored dark brown bird with black wings and tail, white undertail and a thick white specks throughout the body. Often the presence of this bird informs her loud guttural scream that is easy to remember and recognizable.
The life of these birds is closely associated with the spread of nut-bearing plants in the East Siberian and Korean cedar and cedar elfin wood, on the West by filbert. Birds of the Western areas begin to break off and gouging the hazel nuts, when they are still green and firmly in the Cupule, and inside the walnut, but white, like cotton wool substance, in fact nothing. Sitting on a thick branch and holding in the paws a whole “nest” of nuts, Nutcracker, without removing them from the wrappers-Cupule, begins in turn to peck the shell of each nut.
The beak a little open and its ends are hit in different points, although close to each other. Keep up with nuts again, the whole “nest brings on some stump or fallen tree and pulls out of the wrappers, leaving untouched spoiled and rotten fruit. Ripe nuts divides exactly in half at the fold. In the Carpathian forests I found stumps, literally littered with halves of walnut shell. Dark brown color indicated the full ripeness of nuts. It is not excluded that birds collected fruit in the spring. In recent years, nutcrackers, increasingly began to meet in Moscow and neighbouring regions and have even started to nest here.
In the East, in places where cedars, nutcrackers store nuts, thrusting them several pieces under the bark of an old tree stump, hiding in the moss or burying in the sand. Eating pine nuts too, they split the shell, but not always on the leaf. In late autumn, when the nuts will fall off, the birds descend from the trees and jump under the bushes or trunks of the cedars and looking for nuts in the fallen leaves.
Trail nutcrackers
When snow pokupki of nutcrackers is very similar to pokupkami jays searching for nuts and acorns. This similarity is compounded by the great similarity of the prints of the feet of these two forest birds. The Nutcracker as a Jaybird, moves along the ground at a gallop, making the jump length is 36-41 cm while jumping side keeps your fingers close to the average, which the imprint is obtained is narrow.
Print size of 6.4×2, the width of the tracking tracks up to 10 cm From the blue jays, a footprint almost the same size – 6×1.7 cm, it is only a bit shorter due to less long claws. Slightly shorter than lateral toes. Pressed by the middle finger, they with the tip of his claw barely reach the base of the claw of the middle toe, and nutcrackers nails side of fingers are at the level of half the average of the claw. Jay rides are usually shorter jumps and keeps the legs closer to each other.
Among different nuts (in the stomach nutcrackers found kernels and walnuts), nutcrackers eat insects. In the spring it’s mostly beetles, and in autumn the Orthoptera. In the autumn eat the berries – cloudberries, cranberries, stone bramble, bilberry. To lean on the nuts a year in the Kostroma region. I saw; as the mother carefully picked up from the surface of the forest road to the frozen ground the seeds of spruce. The bird tilted his head and beak, blaine seeds. Nutcrackers occasionally eat small birds and frogs.
Litter nutcrackers depending on the feed can be liquid or sufficiently dense and if the bird feeds mostly on nuts. Pogadac of these birds I have found, apparently, in the period of eating nuts birds they do not shed.
Nutcracker nesting begins very early, when in the woods hedgehog’t the snow come down. Its nest is similar to nests of jays. Birds build them on the pine trees just above the ground.
Nutcrackers have a very distinctive, unmistakable feathers, but poetah birds of prey I have not seen them. Although the attempt of Sparrowhawk to hunt these birds I observed not far from Moscow.
