Dennis Paulson writes:

> I've always thought corvids were "smart" because of strong selection on
> their memory abilities because they cache their food. For the same reason,
> you'd think chickadees and nuthatches might be fairly smart, but a
> black-capped chickadee also played the same game with the trap that I
> mentioned for the starlings, briefly moving around the back side. Small
> sample size, though--maybe a single differently abled chickadee.

Some tweeter mentionned a few months ago an article in the Times about
Chickadees. This person was even kind enough to send me the article, but I
can't rememer her name at the moment (maybe I should buy a new brain ?).
Anyway, thanks again to her.

Chickadees "loose" their brain (at least part thereof) every year, and
grow new brain cells each fall to be able (sorry for the anthropomorphism
here, but it's really simpler when it comes to roughly describe biological
stuff :-) to relocate their caches.


Maybe you just made your trapping experience at the wrong seasons, Dennis.
Even so, maybe, the brain cells responsible for memorizing cached food
would not do any good as far as the avoidance of a fence is concerned.

Serge "buy a brain" Le Huitouze

--
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A bird in the bush is better than two in the hand.

Serge Le Huitouze Intelligent Software Group
email: serge at cs.sfu.ca School of Computing Science
tel: (604) 291-5423 Simon Fraser University
fax: (604) 291-3045 Burnaby, B.C., V5A 1S6 CANADA