[ExI] More Bird IQ demonstration

[BillK]

How a 5-Ounce Bird Stores 10,000 Maps in its Head
Robert Krulwich 12/3/2015

<http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/03/how-a-5-ounce-bird-stores-10000-maps-in-its-head/>

Quote:
It weighs only four or five ounces, its brain practically nothing, and
yet, oh my God, what this little bird can do. It’s astonishing.

Around now, as we begin December, the Clark’s nutcracker has,
conservatively, 5,000 (and up to 20,000) treasure maps in its head.
They’re accurate, detailed, and instantly retrievable.

It’s been burying seeds since August. It’s 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 x’s marking those
spots—here, here, not there, but here—and do this for maybe a couple
of miles around. It will remember these x’s for the next nine months.

<snip>
In the 1970s, Stephen Vander Wall ran a tricky little experiment. He
shifted the markers at certain sites, so that instead of pointing to
where the seeds actually were, they now pointed to where the seeds
were not.

And the birds, as you’d expect if they were triangulating, went to the
wrong place.

But at sites where he left the markers untouched, the birds got it
right. That’s a clue that each of these birds has thousands of
marker-specific snapshots in their heads that they use for months and
months. When the spring comes and the birds have their babies, they
continue to visit old sites to gather seeds until their chicks fledge.

The mystery here, the deep mystery, is how do they manage to store so
much data in their heads?
---------------


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