Where'd I put that? Maybe it takes a bird brain to find the car keys

Science News, Feb 14, 2004 by Susan Milius

Should humanity get a little too full of itself and its intellectual prowess, there's always Clark's nutcracker to think about. This pale-gray bird with black wings and a long beak flits through woodlands in the West, collecting seeds during times of plenty and tucking them away for a hungry winter's day. During a year, each bird buries 22,000 to 33,000 seeds in up to 2,500 locations, and scientists estimate that the bird recovers two-thirds of them up to 13 months later.

Just how seed cachers do this has fascinated biologists for decades. Scientific investigation of the topic has broadened and deepened in recent years. Cognitive scientists pose seed-storage puzzles to birds as a way of sorting out how their brains work and might resemble our own. Ecologists are looking for links between seed-caching powers and the perils of a species' environment.

ROBOTS NO MORE Thirty years ago, biologists took a very different view of seed caching, reminisces one of the pioneers of the field, Russell Balda of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Bird-watchers knew that certain species store food. These include some members of the family encompassing jays and crows, as well as that of chickadees and tits. Russian and Scandinavian scientists in particular had documented the remarkable industry and seed-recovery accuracy of birds surviving in far-northern regions. Yet, says Balda, speculation about how the birds manage these retrieval heroics centered on the simplest of mental powers.

Scientists had trouble imagining that the birds have the brainpower to remember where seeds are. Instead, biologists typically speculated that the birds must follow a few simple rules, perhaps having favorite types of hiding places. The birds would hide seeds there; later, returning to the same preferred places, they would happen onto their caches.

Biologists of that era tended to think of animals in general as "very robotic," says Balda. "In the early 1970s, the idea that animals were cognitive creatures was still in its infancy."

Balda started studying pinyon jays and Clark's nutcrackers in the late 1960s. He noticed the nutcrackers heading high into the San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona, and he organized his own flock of extreme bird trackers. To glimpse seed cachers at work, the researchers took advantage of most forms of transportation then available, from snowshoes to motorcycles. The project showed that nutcrackers carry their seeds as far as 25 kilometers to cache them, often hiding their supplies above the tree line. The shy birds were reluctant to cache when observed and often made fake deposits. "It was maddening, Balda says.

The overwhelming logistical problems of observing the birds in the wild led Balda and his colleagues to begin to study caching in the laboratory in 1977. Their first experimental subject, a Eurasian nutcracker, obligingly buried seeds in a large sand floor while Balda watched from a corner. After each caching session, Balda dug up seeds and let the bird back into the aviary to search for its stores. "The bird caught on and refused to cache ever again" Balda says. "Now, we make sure our birds see us as providers of seeds, not robbers." The researchers don't let the birds know they're being watched while hiding seeds.

Once the researchers got the kinks out of their laboratory system, the results began to undermine the idea that the birds just follow simple-minded rules. When Balda gave individual Clark's nutcrackers a second chance to cache seeds in the same sandy aviary floor, the birds often choose different hiding places. Also, when Balda removed all the seeds and smoothed any disturbances in the sand, the birds still searched in 60 percent to 90 percent of the correct locations in a half-hour recovery session. Moreover, the birds were able to find their treasures whether or not the researchers put landmarks such as cinder blocks, wall posters, and two by-fours in the room. These findings challenged the idea that the birds were following some subtle sensory clue to the seeds themselves instead of relocating particular sites.

In a further refinement of the experiments, Balda's research team built a floor that was 30 feet by 50 feet, with 380 holes drilled in it to hold either Dixie cups of sand or plugs. This way the people, not the birds, determined the possible cache locations. Still, the birds maintained their high success rate in relocating their hiding places.

Could it be that the birds were just poking around randomly until they happened on their caches? The rates of recovery, from half to virtually all the seeds cached, made that seem unlikely.

Balda also tested one of his graduate students at caching. The student hid seeds and 30 days later found only about half as many caches as a bird typically did.

Evidence grew that the remarkable birds indeed remembered spatiallocations for their caches, says Balda, and bird minds began to seem more interesting than many scientists had expected.

Moreover, scientific opinion about the minds of animals in general shifted during the 1970s and 1980s, and biologists started looking at mental capability as another trait that natural selection shapes. Just as the fastest and biggest might best survive, so might the smartest.