A slender-billed nutcracker working a cone in the stone pines, Teg, 2025.
Over the last five years I have spent time photographing the slender-billed nutcrackers in Umeå, specifically around the Tegsvägen / Norra Obbolavägen roundabout. Over the last years mature trees had started to be felled as part of the road reconstruction.
A few weeks back, while eagerly anticipating the nutcrackers' return, I decided to revisit the area and was shocked by what I saw. What was left was bare earth and fencing. A few stone pines still stood nearby. Where the mature trees had been, the council had replanted young stone pine and limes.
I decided to contact the council, although I was aware that the birds were not endangered and that trees still remained. I thought it was important for them to understand that it was an area that was being used by the birds as a feeding ground. I felt they needed to be aware that this slow quiet erasure had been witnessed, regardless of whether the ecological impact was significant or not.
The slender-billed nutcracker arrived in Umeå in 1977, feeding preferably on the Siberian stone pine (cembratall), which had been planted around the railway stations of northern Sweden from the late nineteenth century onward, part of an effort to spread a kind of park culture along the line. So it's fair to say the bird followed the tree.
Over time the birds settled, with the first confirmed Umeå breeding in 1981. None of this is native. Not the trees, not the bird. A Siberian bird, living on a Siberian tree, planted by a Swedish railway company for reasons that had nothing to do with birds. The city built the conditions for a new species to move in, and it had taken roughly a hundred years to happen.
A cache is a small hidden store of food. The nutcracker buries seeds one at a time, in thousands of separate spots across its territory, in moss, under stumps, against the base of trees. It does this through the autumn, and then through winter and spring it digs them back up, one by one, to feed itself and its young. Nutcrackers cache 10,000 to 30,000 seeds a year, recovered from memory even under deep snow. It does this with landmarks. The bird reads the terrain (a stone, a stump, the particular angle of a particular tree) and indexes its caches against those fixed points. The map is the landscape. A pair holds a territory of roughly 11 to 15 hectares, kept for life. The nest is built in March and April, close to the trunk of a conifer, and the young hatch from early April, fed on the seeds the parents buried the previous autumn. So the bird does not depend on a single nest tree. It depends on the whole memorised landscape, the entire indexed map of buried food. And early April, when there are chicks to feed and the caches are being read back one by one, is the most sensitive moment in its year.
When you remove the trees, you are not only removing habitat. You are removing the index. The seeds are still in the ground, where the bird left them. But the landmarks they were measured against are gone. The food survives. The map does not.
You cannot replant a memory. A sapling is not a landmark.
I wrote to the council and asked three plain questions. Was an ecological survey carried out before the felling? Was the presence of nutcrackers or other protected species considered? Could the remaining trees be taken into account as the work goes on?
No ecological survey was carried out. They say so directly. The impact, they explained, was judged instead on the "limited scope" of the work. The felling concerned "individual trees" in an area where most of the tree stock, including several stone pines, is being kept, so the area's function as bird habitat, in their words, largely remains. No active nests or ongoing breeding were "noted." The felling was, they say, outside the birds' main breeding period. And there will be replanting: one stone pine, and two limes.
For what it's worth, I do not believe there were nests in the felled trees. In five years of watching the area I have not seen breeding behaviour there. But that is rather the point. A nutcracker's nest is not the whole of its habitat. The trees that came down were part of the bird's foraging and caching ground, which is precisely what the wider territory exists to provide.
Three things stay with me. The work was said to be outside the birds' main breeding period, but the nutcracker is one of the earliest breeders we have, building in March and hatching by early April, and the site closed on the ninth of that month. No active nests were noted, but no one had been looking for them, and a nutcracker nest sits high and tight against a conifer trunk, not where a passing glance would catch it. And the reassurance that most of the trees remain answers a question the law does not actually ask. What the law actually asks, and what the council seems to have answered instead, is the subject of Part 2.
Sources
This piece was written in collaboration with Claude, a large language model made by Anthropic. Claude helped me find Swedish-language sources, work through legal material, and shape the prose across many drafts. The argument and the editing are mine, but the writing is genuinely collaborative. The wider questions about how these tools are trained, and at whose expense, are real ones, and I will come back to them in a later post.
The 1977 establishment of the slender-billed nutcracker (Nucifraga caryocatactes macrorhynchos) in Umeå and Skellefteå, the spread along the Norrland coast, and the breeding population of around 600 pairs are from Nötkråka, Swedish Wikipedia, sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nötkråka. The first confirmed Umeå breeding in 1981 is cited in Skånes ornitologiska förening to Vår Fågelvärld 44:417, skof.se/fagelintresse/artfakta/notkraka. The same source describes the Norrland establishment as a direct consequence of cembratall planting in the region.
The planting of Siberian stone pine around Norrland railway stations in the late 1800s and early 1900s by SJ, "to spread park culture," is from Cembratall, Swedish Wikipedia, sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cembratall. Arboretum Norr describes the same bird-and-tree relationship, arboretum-norr.se.
The biology of the bird, the caching numbers, the territory of 11 to 15 hectares kept for life, nest-building in March and April close to a conifer trunk, and hatching from early April with chicks fed on cached seeds from the previous autumn, come from Nötkråka, Swedish Wikipedia, with supporting material from fagelriket.se/notkraka and sodra.com.
The Norra Obbolavägen project page, with the project description, is at Umeå kommun, umea.se. The reply from the council was received in writing in May 2026.
Photographs were taken by the author in Teg, Umeå, between 2022 and 2026.