Wilson - Clark's Crow

Alexander Wilson's sketch of "Clark's Crow"

The hand-colored engraving

"Clarks Crow"
"Drawn from Nature by A. Wilson; Engraved by A. Lawson"

lexander Wilson (1766-1813), a pioneer American ornithologist, drew the original pencil sketch of "Clark's Crow," and may have applied the watercolors to the engraving Alexander Lawson (1772-1846) made from it for Wilson's book, American Ornithology.¹ The original size of the copperplate engraving was approximately 12.5 x 13.6 in.

Clark's namesake bird does indeed belong to the family Corvidae ("crows"), along with jays, magpies, ravens, and common crows. Wilson classified it in the genus Corvus; The French ornithologist M.J. Brisson (1723-1806) had introduced the genus Nucifraga — "nut breaker" — which John James Audubon's co-worker, William MacGillivray (1796-1852), linked with Wilson's specific epithet in Audubon's Ornithological Biography (1831).² The latter half of the bionomial, columbiana, — "of the Columbia" River — was appropriate inasmuch as Clark first mentioned it while he was in the valley of "Lewis's River" — i.e., the Salmon River, which is one of the headwaters of the Columbia. Today it is known to most people as Clark's nutcracker. He originally grouped it with two other birds closely associated with the two explorers, the western tanager and Lewis's woodpecker. They were

but a small part of the valuable collection of new subjects in natural history discovered and preserved, admidst a thousand dangers and difficulties, by those two enterprising travellers whose intrepidity was only equalled by their discretion, and by their active and laborious pursuit of whatever might tend to render their journey useful to science and to their country. It was the request and particular wish of Captain Lewis, made to me in person, that I should make drawings of such of the feathered tribes as had been preserved, and were new. That brave soldier, that amiable and excellent man, over whose solitary grave in the wilderness I have since shed tears of affliction, having been cut off in the prime of his life, I hope I shall be pardoned for consecrating this humble note to his memory, until a more able pen shall do better justice to the subject.

Wilson explained that "the figure in the plate was drawn with particular care, after a minute examination and measurement of the only preserved skin that was saved; and which is now deposited in Peale's Museum."

It seemed to Wilson that the new bird somewhat resembled the Jackdaw of Europe (Corvus monedula) — "several of the party supposing it to be the same" — but noted that "its formidable claws, which approach to those of the Falco genus,...would seem to intimate, that its food consists of living animals, for whose destruction these weapons must be necessary." He learned first-hand from "different individuals of Lewis and Clark's party" that it frequented rivers and the seashore, and probably ate fish.³

Wilson was wrong, of course, but he had only his notes from conversations with Lewis and others, such as William Clark and George Shannon, and never got to the Northwest to see for himself. Nor could he benefit from the appropriate entries in either Clark's or Lewis's journals. Clark's nutcracker is found from the east slopes of the Coast Ranges to the Rockies, mainly at high elevations, where it favors the seeds of the whitebark pine. It does not frequent the seashore, nor is it a fish-eater, but it is opportunistic, which certainly earned it the common epithet "camp robber," and it does feed on carrion, a habit that possibly gave rise to the nickname "meat hawk" in some quarters. However, its favorite food is the seed of the subalpine whitebark pine.⁴ In retrospect, the misunderstanding simply underscores the importance of naturalists' and artists' follow-ups of Lewis and Clark's discoveries.

--Joseph Mussulman; rev. 12/05

1. Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology or, The natural history of the birds of the United States: Illustrated with plates, engraved and colored from original drawings taken from nature, 9 vols. (Philadelphia: Bradford & Inskeep, 1808-1814), 1:321-22 and Plate 20.

2. Paul Russell Cutright, "A History of Lewis's Woodpecker and Clark's Nutcracker," We Proceeded On, Vol. 10, No's. 2 and 3 (May 1984), 13n.

3. American Ornithology, edited by George Ord (3 vols., 18288), 1:180.

4. D. F. Tomback, "Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana)." In A. Poole and F. Gill, eds., The Birds of North America (Philadelphia: The Birds of North America, Inc.), No. 331.