The nutcracker

We walked along the beach with a raven for a little while this afternoon (14 March 2020).  It was searching the wrack line for potential food.  At one point the raven found a walnut (see below).  [I think the walnuts wash down the creeks and rivers and then end up on the beaches.]

 

The raven walked over to a piece of driftwood and held the walnut in place with its foot:

 

 Then it tried to open the walnut by hammering it with its bill:

 

This walnut was apparently too hard to crack, or the raven decided it wasn't worthwhile, so it left the walnut behind and started searching for something else.

 

A shared interest

I had a funny experience a few days ago.  I walked outside of the house and heard a very loud, "Crrraack!"  I looked around, and noticed a large nut in the street.  And then I looked around some more, and noticed an American Crow flying down to the nut.

It made me smile for a few reasons.  I'm fascinated by corvid behavior, and this was the first time I'd seen a crow doing this — using height, gravity, and a hard surface to open a nut.

It also helped me solve a mystery.  A few days before this, we had found a large walnut in the front yard (on a patch of cement).  There aren't any walnut trees growing adjacent to our house, so we wondered where the nut had come from.  When I saw the crow dropping the walnut on the street, I realized what had probably happened. 

 

And, seeing a crow with a walnut (and then finding many walnut shells in the area) also provided some circumstantial evidence for another puzzle.  You might recall that I've been watching some White-tailed Kites come to an evening roost, and that in the 1960s a large kite roost was reported in Cotati (see post from 5 October 2015).  Those kites were roosting in a walnut orchard, so I had been wondering about whether there used to be a walnut orchard near this house. 

Of course, I'm left with another piece of the puzzle — exactly where are the crows getting the walnuts, and how far is that site from our house?  We'll have to start scanning for walnut trees in the neighborhood.

Perhaps both the crows and the kites have an interest in walnuts, but for different reasons?