Chickadees get smarter as they move up mountains

If you want to enhance your memory, consider moving up a mountain. The spatial recall of mountain chickadees ? tiny songbirds that inhabit high regions of the western US ? is better the higher up they live.

Vladimir Pravosudov of the University of Nevada, in Reno, and his colleagues collected 48 juvenile birds (Poecile gambeli) from three different elevations in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Chickadees that lived just 600 metres higher than others had larger hippocampi ? a part of the brain strongly linked to memory. Not only that, they were also better at remembering where food was hidden in lab tests.

It makes sense that birds living higher up would have a better memory, says Pravosudov. Mountain chickadees are "scatter hoarders", storing their favourite winter food of pine seeds in thousands of different spots among the trees. At higher altitudes, where it stays cold for longer, birds must store more seeds, and remember where they cached them.

The effect could apply to other scatter-hoarding species, says Pravosudov, though he rules out most squirrels and rodents, which are either not active during the winter or put everything in one place and so do not need a better memory.

Could global warming change things? Very possibly. "The selection pressure that the winter provides will be less, so the birds are going to get dumber," says Pravosudov. Time to consider a simpler pantry?

Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.04.018

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