While chickadees look cute, they are also running one of the most impressive memory systems in the animal world. They hide food across the landscape, then somehow return to an insane number of individual spots later, even after snow, wind, and chaos try to erase the evidence. In this episode, host Dr. Scott Taylor is joined by Dr. Vladimir Pravosudov, Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, to dig into how chickadee brains pull off this feat, what we know from decades of experiments.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

1. How many caches chickadees actually make
2. Why birds from harsher climates often have larger hippocampi
3. How flexible brain structure really can be within an individual’s lifetime (we’re busting some myths here!)
4. Studying these little geniuses in the lab vs. the wild

If you enjoy this one, follow Okay, But… Birds and share it with a friend who thinks “bird brain” is an insult.