He was exploring the rugged Salmon River canyon, in what is now northern Idaho, on a typically harrowing day: A hunter from his group had just returned from a close run-in with some Native Americans, the terrain was brutally steep and rugged, and he didn’t know where he was going. But sometime that afternoon the explorer noticed a bird interesting enough to record in his now famous journal:“I saw to day [a] bird of the woodpecker kind which fed on Pine burs it’s Bill and tale white the wings black every other part of a light brown, and about the size of a robin.”He didn’t have time to elaborate (or punctuate) further, but his partner, Meriwether Lewis, described the same bird less than a year later with better detail and leisure, while waiting patiently for snow to melt in the Bitterroot Mountains on the expedition’s eastward return journey. Lewis correctly surmised that Clark’s black-and-white bird wasn’t a woodpecker but a corvid—related to crows and jays.“Since my arrival here I have killed several birds of the corvus genus,”
