A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
cache
A store of food hidden by an animal for later retrieval — a squirrel’s buried acorn, a mountain lion’s kill covered with leaves and debris, a Clark’s nutcracker’s thousands of pine seed hoards, a shrike’s prey impaled on a thorn.
Etymology
French cacher, to hide, possibly from Latin coactare, to press together, to store. The word entered English through the fur trade — trappers and voyageurs cached supplies along their routes.
Notes
The Clark’s nutcracker can cache up to 33,000 seeds in a season and retrieve them months later with remarkable accuracy. The whitebark pines of the high Rockies depend on the nutcracker’s forgotten caches for regeneration.