Natural History Wanderings

NPR writes about how chickadees remember where they store seeds. Each year staring in October Black-capped Chickadees gather and cache seeds in their areas which are about 10 square miles. They hide the seeds in hundreds of places but somehow manage to remember most of their hiding places. To help remember where they store their cache the part of the chickadee’s brain responsible for remembering where things are expands in volume by about 30 percent, stays big during the winter, and then shrinks back in the spring. The overall size of the brain might grow a little, the real change is in the number of neurons, or brain cells.

Read more at:  What Chickadees Have That I Want. Badly : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR.