Chickadees will also make sure to hide themselves as well from other birds before storing their food in order to make sure their hard-earned seeds aren't pilfered by someone else! Sometimes, they will even re-hide a cache to make sure no one saw them! Good cache locations include behind cracked tree bark, under a pile of leaves, beneath a craggy rock, or a deep knothole in a tree trunk.
Black-capped Chickadees (and other chickadees and titmice) are particularly exceptional at food caching (storing). Each individual bird can hide tens of thousands of seeds each year.... and then find them all again during the winter when food is scarce!
The size of a chickadee's hippocampus (the memories part of the brain) will literally grow in size during times of year when it is caching extra food in order to help store the increased number of food memories being made.
Chickadees will also make sure to hide themselves as well from other birds before storing their food in order to make sure their hard-earned seeds aren't pilfered by someone else! Sometimes, they will even re-hide a cache to make sure noone saw them! Good cache locations include behind cracked tree bark, under a pile of leaves, beneath a craggy rock, or a deep knothole in a tree trunk.
All this hiding and re-hiding has an interesting side effect. Because some caches are bound to be forgotten or not needed over the winter, birds end up becoming inadvertent tree planters!
Comments