Spatial memory in food-storing birds

In the wild, several species of birds among the parids (tits and chickadees) and corvids store food in scattered locations and find it again days or months later. The food storers that have been tested use memory to recovery their stores in the laboratory. The importance of memory to a food-storing way of life suggests that these birds possess an adaptive specialization of some aspect or aspects of memory. Recent work has focused on analysing how memory is involved in recovering stored food, discovering how this memory can be tested in tasks that do not involve food storing, and comparing the memory of storing birds with that of their non-storing relatives in a variety of tasks.

[1]  D. Sherry FOOD STORING IN THE PARIDAE , 1989 .

[2]  L. Petit,et al.  Winter caching ecology of deciduous woodland birds and adaptations for protection of stored food , 1989 .

[3]  Clam storage in a northwestern crow (Corvus caurinus): dispersion and sequencing , 1985 .

[4]  D. Tomback,et al.  Bolus recovery by gray jays: an experimental analysis , 1986, Animal Behaviour.

[5]  J. Krebs,et al.  On the evolution of hoarding behaviour , 1978, Animal Behaviour.

[6]  S. Healy,et al.  Spatial memory of paridae: comparison of a storing and a non-storing species, the coal tit, Parus ater, and the great tit, P. major , 1990, Animal Behaviour.

[7]  D. Sherry Food storage by black-capped chickadees: Memory for the location and contents of caches , 1984, Animal Behaviour.

[8]  John R. Krebs,et al.  Food storing by marsh tits , 1981, Animal Behaviour.

[9]  Russell P. Balda,et al.  Spatial Memory in Seed-Caching Corvids , 1990 .

[10]  Myron C. Baker,et al.  Evidence Against Observational Learning in Storage and Recovery of Seeds by Black-Capped Chickadees , 1988 .

[11]  Russell P. Balda,et al.  Cache recovery and spatial memory in Clark's nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana). , 1985 .

[12]  D. Sherry What food-storing birds remember. , 1984 .

[13]  Stephen B. Vander Wall,et al.  An experimental analysis of cache recovery in Clark's nutcracker , 1982, Animal Behaviour.

[14]  N. Verbeek,et al.  The Food Storage Behaviour of the Northwestern Crow , 1983 .

[15]  David F. Sherrt Food storage, memory, and marsh tits , 1982, Animal Behaviour.

[16]  J. Krebs,et al.  Memory for the location of stored food in marsh tits , 1981, Animal Behaviour.

[17]  D. Sherry,et al.  Long-term memory for cache sites in the black-capped chickadee , 1990, Animal Behaviour.

[18]  J. Krebs,et al.  Why hoard? The economics of food storing in tits, Parus spp. , 1990 .

[19]  Russell P. Balda,et al.  Revisits to emptied cache sites by Clark's nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) , 1986, Animal Behaviour.

[20]  P. Rozin,et al.  Specific hungers and poison avoidance as adaptive specializations of learning. , 1971, Psychological review.

[21]  Foraging for stored food , 1984, Behavioural Processes.