The Black-capped Chickadee has an intense curiosity to investigate everything in its home territory. Their interest even includes human beings. They do not migrate but seek bird feeders easily.
Try to say their name three times quickly and then chuckle.
Dr. Fernando Nottebohm of Rockefeller University in New York studied the ability of Black-capped Chickadees to recall locations of hundreds of stored seeds. His lab produced the first evidence that in the adult brain of birds with the learning of new behaviors, neurons are replaced periodically. During late summer and fall, brains of chickadees grow as the birds hide food, usually seeds, in their home range. By winter they know where to find their stash.
The hippocampus, part of the brain that grows, plays a role in spatial memory. Dr. Nottebohm suggests that when demand for memory space peaks, the chickadee discards cells that hold old memories and replaces them with new cells that store memories.
Studying the ability of a bird’s brain to generate new neurons might uncover ways to replace brain cells lost due to injury, stroke or degeneration, as happens in diseases such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Alzheimer's.
The term, "bird brain," does not suit the chickadee.
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