This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

The tree people in the Lord of the Rings, the ants, can get around by walking. But for real trees, well, it's harder to uproot.

Because it's a cessile organism, literally rooted into the ground, it is unable to leave and go elsewhere.

Mario Pezendorfer, a behaviorally called it is unable to leave and go elsewhere.

Mario Pezendorfer, a behavioral ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

When a tree first starts growing in a certain area, it's likely that the climactic envelope, so the temperature, humidity, soil composition and so on,

suits it because it otherwise would be unable to grow from a seedling,

but as it ages these conditions may change and the area around it may no longer be suitable for its offspring.

And if that happens, walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, oaks, pines, many rely exclusively on so-called

scatter hoarders, like birds, to move their hefty seeds to new locales.

Many members of the family Corvide, the Crows, and MacPies, are scatter hoarders, meaning

that they like to store food for the winter that they then subsequently retrieve.

Or not. And when they do forget something, a seedling has a chance to grow,

sometimes a good distance away. The Clark's nutcracker, which is found in alpine regions of Western North America is definitely the rock star among the scatterhording Corvits.

They hide up to 100,000 seeds per year, up to 30 kilometers away from the seed source and I have a very tight symbiotic relationship

with several pine species most notably the white bark pine.

Pezendorf and his colleagues cataloged the seed-scattering activities of the Clark's Nutcracker

and its cousins in a new review paper in the journal The Condor Ornithological Applications. They also write that as trees outgrow their ideal habitats

in the face of climate change or battle new insects and disease, these flying ecosystem engineers

could be a big help replanting trees.

It's a solution Pezendorfer says that's good for us,

because getting birds to do the work is cheap and effective,

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