Year: 1989
Type: article
Abstract: Assra.Acr.-Foodstoring is widespread in the Paridae.Chickadees and tits store seeds, nuts, and invertebrate prey in a scattered distribution within their home range.They can establish hundreds to thousands of caches per day, and place only one, or a very few, food items at each cache site.Field experiments show that food is collected a few days after caching it, but there are also indications that stored food may remain available for longer periods.Behavioral and neurophysiological studies show that memory for the spatial locations of cache sites is the primary method used to retrieve stored food.The hippocampus plays an important role in the kinds of memory used to recover stored food, and is larger in size in families such as the Paridae in which food storing is common.The ecological and evolutionary relations between food storing and diet, body size, seasonality of the food supply, memory, and social organization are not well understood, but study of the Paridae can help to answer many of these questions.The Paridae is one of several families of birds in which food storing is common.Food storing also occurs in many woodpeckers, nuthatches, and corvids, in a variety of raptors, shrikes, and bellmagpies (Cracticidae), in some muscicapid flycatchers (Powlesland 1980), and in bowerbirds (Pruett-Jones and Pruett-Jones 1985).Fourteen species of chickadees and tits are known to store food, and the behavior is known not to occur, or to occur very rarely, in two others (Table 1).That leaves thirty-one species for which there is no information on the occurrence of food storing.The behavior of many of these parids is not well known, and food storing may have been overlooked or not reported in others.This paper describes food storing as it occurs in chickadees and tits, emphasizing research on the role of memory in the recovery of caches of stored food. One of the earliest descriptions of food storing by any bird is that of Johann Ferdinand Adam Pernau, Baron von Perney (1660-1731).His observations and methods were very sophisticated for their time but were practically unknown until their rediscovery by Stresemann (1947).In a book engagingly titled "Agreeable Country Pleasures (Angenehme Landlust)," Pernau writes: "He that searches for a proof of animals having some kind of reason, may allow a Marsh Tit (' Hanfmeise,' Puruspahtris) to fly about in his room in which a tree was set where she can live.After she gets used to that room, one has to withhold food from her for half a day and then to strew uncrushed hemp on the table, or on the floor.Immediately the Marsh Tit will come and carry away in her bill three or
Author: Sherry, David F
Language: English
Topic: Avian ecology and behavior
Subfield: Ecology
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W167437965