What Chickadees Have That I Want. Badly

First I look in my right coat pocket. Nothing. Then my left. Nothing. Then my pants, right side — no. Then my pants, left side — yes! This is me at my front door, looking for my keys. Every day.

I have this extraordinary ability to not remember where my keys are. It’s uncanny. Every morning, I lock the front door, step away, fall into a 2 ½ second trance during which I place my keys in lord-knows-which pocket, even if a second earlier I was saying to myself, “OK, remember where you put your keys.” But I don’t. Which is why, around this time of year, I envy chickadees. They’ve solved this problem.

You know these birds. Here in the Northeast, they are everywhere, and they stick around during the winter. The “black-capped” ones are most familiar, with two-tone heads that make them look like masked bank robbers. The thing about them is that in the late fall, they have an enormous amount of remembering to do.

Starting in October, they are busy flying around their territory — which can cover about 10 square miles — gathering seeds from fruiting bushes and trees, and then caching them, storing them, in hundreds and hundreds of hiding places. So if you’re a chickadee you have to remember … (I’ve marked the spots in red) …

Robert Krulwich/NPR

… that you left seeds on the upper-left window sill of a particular house, also on the upside of that house’s chimney, also between twigs two and three on the tree on the right side of that house, and on and on, creating a list so long (especially compared to my own paltry four pockets) that it would make my head explode.

Which is, by the way, what happens to chickadees’ heads. They (almost literally) explode. Every fall.

Birds With Elastic Brains

According to professor Diane Lee at Cal State University, Long Beach, every fall the part of the chickadee’s brain responsible for remembering where things are expands in volume by approximately 30 percent, stays big during the winter, and then shrinks back in the spring.

Let me say that again: They grow more brain when they need to remember things; then shrink that brain when the “remembering” season ends…

Read the whole post here.