A mountain chickadee waking up in the Sierra Nevada range on a snowy morning has no time to dawdle.
Weighing about as much as a pencil, it needs to find stashed pine nuts within minutes or succumb to the howling winds and subzero temperatures. But fortunately, these tiny songbirds are master memorizers, says behavioral ecologist Ai Ana Richmond. A given chickadee knows exactly where it hid each of the hundred thousand seeds it stored for winter.
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Richmond, of the University of Nevada, Reno, and her UNR colleagues trek year-round to the Sierras to study this remarkable ability — by…
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