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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow a 5-Ounce Bird Stores 10,000 Maps in Its Head
IT WEIGHS ONLY four or five ounces, its brain practically nothing, and yet, oh my God, what this little bird can do. Its astonishing.
Around now, as we begin December, the Clarks nutcracker has, conservatively, 5,000 (and up to 20,000) treasure maps in its head. Theyre accurate, detailed, and instantly retrievable.
Its been burying seeds since August. Its hidden so many (one study says almost 100,000 seeds) in the forest, meadows, and tree nooks that it can now fly up, look down, and see little xs marking those spotshere, here, not there, but hereand do this for maybe a couple of miles around. It will remember these xs for the next nine months.
How does it do it?
32 Seeds a Minute
It starts in high summer, when whitebark pine trees produce seeds in their conesripe for plucking. Nutcrackers dash from tree to tree, inspect, and, with their sharp beaks, tear into the cones, pulling seeds out one by one. They work fast. One study clocked a nutcracker harvesting 32 seeds per minute.
These seeds are not for eating. Theyre for hiding. Like a squirrel or chipmunk, the nutcracker clumps them into pouches located, in the birds case, under the tongue. Its very expandable
The pouch can hold an average of 92.7 plus or minus 8.9 seeds, wrote Stephen Vander Wall and Russell Balda. Biologist Diana Tomback thinks its less, but one time she saw a (bigger than usual) nutcracker haul 150 seeds in its mouth. He was a champ, she told me.
Next, they land. Sometimes they peck little holes in the topsoil or under the leaf litter. Sometimes they leave seeds in nooks high up on trees. Most deposits have two or three seeds, so that by the time November comes around, a single bird has created 5,000 to 20,000 hiding places. They dont stop until it gets too cold. They are cache-aholics, says Tomback.
When December comeslike right around nowthe trees go bare and its time to switch from hide to seek mode. Nobody knows exactly how the birds manage this, but the best guess is that when a nutcracker digs its hole, it will notice two or three permanent objects at the site: an irregular rock, a bush, a tree stump. The objects, or markers, will be at different angles from the hiding place.
Next, they measure. This seed cache, they note, is a certain distance from object one, a certain distance from object two, a certain distance from object three, says Tomback. What theyre doing is triangulating. Theyre kind of taking a photograph with their minds to find these objects using reference points.
Psychologist Alan Kamil has a different view. He thinks the birds note the landmarks and remember not so much the distances, but the angleswhere one object is in relation to the others. (The tree stumps 80 degrees south of the rock.) These nutcrackers are doing geometry more than measuring.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/12/03/how-a-5-ounce-bird-stores-10000-maps-in-its-head/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=SpecialEdition_Escape_20200820&rid=2D7EBD8232363870D75E126868635ACF
Really quite fascinating.
underpants
(182,868 posts)Karadeniz
(22,563 posts)nycbos
(6,037 posts)Anon-C
(3,430 posts)Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)simply amazing
Dream Girl
(5,111 posts)USALiberal
(10,877 posts)Disaffected
(4,559 posts)what bird's tiny brains are capable of, especially considering all the other tasks their brain must accomplish. Just the amount of information processing that must occur for vision and flight is huge, let alone everything else.
Same thing for insects - they are capable of complex tasks with only a relatively tiny number of neurons. I always marvel for instance at dragon flies as they swoop and soar in their pursuit of other flying insects.
Robots made by mear humans don't even come close.
crickets
(25,982 posts)Buns_of_Fire
(17,191 posts)That's before he tucks them away in the Resolute Desk, in the bunker, under the carpet, behind the portrait of Andrew Jackson, and in Hope Hicks' underwear drawer.
Duppers
(28,125 posts)You keep bringing us the most interesting posts! Thanks!