I must admit that I have always had a hard time remembering names, and as I get older it seems to be getting worse; however, my friends appear to be having senior moments as well. In case you are under fifty, a senior moment occurs when one is talking and suddenly forgets what he or she is about to say. Forgetfulness can be dangerous to your health; for example, if you forget your wedding anniversary, there will definitely be repercussions. |
Although memory is an important part of a human’s life it is also invaluable to wildlife. Year after year robins and wrens return to our backyards, with studies showing that these same birds raised young in our backyards during the previous year. Biologists have many theories as to how these birds are able to return year after year to the same area, and one theory is that some birds have remarkable memories.
The white-breasted nuthatch, titmouse, etc. will carry seeds from a bird feeder to store in bark crevices, under leaves and bury in the soft ground. In one study done, a white-breasted nuthatch carried away thirty-eight pieces of suet in an hour. The suet, which was pushed into bark crevices, was also discovered by other nuthatches, brown creepers and a chickadee.
Blue jays also take food, such as acorns, sunflower seeds, peanuts, etc., from birdfeeders to store for later use. The question is how do these birds find these stored foods?
Some birds show a remarkable “place memory” in returning to and retrieving their caches. Thick-billed nuthatches (Nucifraga caryocatactes), which are related to the jays, relocate their caches of pine seeds even when the ground is covered by snow. The nuthatches were observed flying to the spot where they had previously buried seeds and then dug directly down to the stored food. In one experiment, it was found that these birds recovered up to 70% of their stored food by visually remembering the exact places where the food had been buried. In another report, a Clark’s nutcracker, in the Rocky Mountains, had dug directly down through eight inches of snow to recover Douglas fir seed cones that it had stored earlier in the fall.
In 1951, in the Hainault Forest, Essex, England, 35 to 40 Eurasian common jays collected acorns from oak trees for their winter stores.
Individually, they gathered and buried an estimated 200,000 acorns up to three quarters of a mile away. Many of these acorns were recovered later, apparently by remembering the burial sites.
Woodpeckers, nuthatches, titmice, shrikes and members of the crow family all store food for later use. Their larders contain insects, mice, small birds and other foods, which they hang on thorns, crotches of trees, bushes and barbs of fences. These birds return to feed on the stored foods, sometimes up to eight months later. This storing of uneaten prey is a well-known habit of the kestrel, goshawk, peregrine falcon and several owls.
Recently, I attended a beginner’s GPS Course (Global Positioning System), which uses satellites to locate your position as an aid to keep a person from getting lost. This positioning location is nothing new in wildlife since homing pigeons are said to remember their homes, even after several years of absence. Some birds use memory in part when migrating, by remembering landmarks and nesting territories.
According to Augustus Brown’s book Why Pandas Do Handstands, it was found, in memory experiments with animals, that sheep are good at remembering faces. Some sheep have the capability of recognizing the faces of up to 50 sheep and 10 humans and retaining this memory for up to two years.
Cats have better memories than dogs. Tests conducted by the University of Michigan concluded that while a dog’s memory lasts no more than five minutes, a cat’s can last as long as sixteen hours, exceeding even that of monkeys and orangutans.
Small parasitic wasps can be trained to sniff out drugs and explosives.
Unlike dogs, which can take years to be trained for this job, wasps learn the task in half an hour.
In another study, it was learned that fur seal mothers and their pups have the ability to remember each others calls long after they have been separated. Though unusual for mammals, these seals recognized and responded to each others voices for as along as four years after going their separate ways.
The more we study wildlife and nature, the more we realize that we have a lot to learn about the fish, birds and animals that share this planet with us.