We humans define ourselves by our extraordinary mental powers—feats of memory among them. The Latin name we gave our species, Homo sapiens, translates as “wise man.” And yet, in our hyperdistracted modern lives, we fall victim to what is popularly known as refrigerator blindness, a common affliction defined in a (tongue-in-cheek) paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal as the “selective loss of visual acuity in association with a common foraging behavior.” Many of us have faced the seemingly impossible task of finding the peanut butter hidden behind the pickles. But it actually wasn’t hidden at all—we just overlooked it. For us, it’s a forgivable lapse, and easily rectified. Not so for Canada jays, who use boreal and subalpine forests like a massive refrigerator-freezer.
Canada jays don’t store their food at a single location, like the average 0.5-cubic-meter North American fridge. They cache it in the innumerable trees covering a territory of 26 to 130 hectares, or 36 to 180 soccer fields. To see themselves through the winter, they will store just about anything, including spiders, berries, seeds, and carrion, plus bits of bread, nuts, and cheese procured from passing humans. Their survival, and that of their brood, depends on their formidable memory—and their capacity to understand thievery.
Corvids are aware that other birds may be watching where they cache their food. To avoid getting robbed, scrub jays, for example, employ highly elaborate tactics similar to a magician’s use of misdirection. They discreetly hide food in one location while pretending to hide it in numerous other places to draw the observer’s attention away from the real thing. That kind of awareness requires a high level of perception, says psychologist Nicola Clayton, who founded the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England. She shares Strickland’s fascination with corvids. One of the big ideas her team explores is mental time travel, the ability to recall the past or plan for the future, an ability we have long assumed is unique to humans. What this reveals, Clayton concludes, is that these jays can put themselves in the place of another individual and alter their behavior based on what might happen in the future.
Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information. London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.
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