.dropcap { color: #838078; float: left; font-size: 82px; line-height: 60px; padding: 5px 8px 0 0; } .art-aside-tmp { height: auto !important; min-height: auto !important; } On a cloudy march morning in the Cascade Mountains of central Washington State, Taza Schaming has gotten her hopes up once again. She flew in late last night from her home in upstate New York and woke early to drive two hours to a trailhead outside the town of Wenatchee, but she’s upbeat as she straps her snowshoes to her pack. Her goal sounds simple enough: capture six Clark’s Nutcrackers and fit them with satellite tracking tags. But Schaming, a wildlife ecologist with the nonprofit Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, has failed twice to trap the sleek gray corvids on these rocky slopes. The first time, in March 2020, pandemic shutdowns forced her to turn around before she made it to Washington. In 2022 she spent days trekking to remote bait stations where she’d heard...