BY ROBERT KRULWICH
How does it do it?
32 Seeds a Minute
It starts in high summer, when whitebark pine trees produce seeds in their cones—ripe for plucking. Nutcrackers dash from tree to tree, inspect, and, with their sharp beaks, tear into the cones, pulling seeds out one by one. They work fast. One study clocked a nutcracker harvesting “32 seeds per minute.”
These seeds are not for eating. They’re for hiding. Like a squirrel or chipmunk, the nutcracker clumps them into pouches located, in the bird’s case, under the tongue. It’s very expandable …
The pouch “can hold an average of 92.7 plus or minus 8.9 seeds,” wrote Stephen Vander Wall and Russell Balda. Biologist Diana Tomback thinks it’s less, but one time she saw a (bigger than usual) nutcracker haul 150 seeds in its mouth. “He was a champ,” she told me.
Next, they land. Sometimes they peck little holes in the topsoil or under the leaf litter. Sometimes they leave seeds in nooks high up on trees. Most deposits have two or three seeds, so that by the time November comes around, a single bird has created 5,000 to 20,000 hiding places. They don’t stop until it gets too cold. “They are cache-aholics,” says Tomback.
When December comes—like right around now—the trees go bare and it’s time to switch from hide to seek mode. Nobody knows exactly how the birds manage this, but the best guess is that when a nutcracker digs its hole, it will notice two or three permanent objects at the site: an irregular rock, a bush, a tree stump. The objects, or markers, will be at different angles from the hiding place.
Next, they measure. This seed cache, they note, “is a certain distance from object one, a certain distance from object two, a certain distance from object three,” says Tomback. “What they’re doing is triangulating. They’re kind of taking a photograph with their minds to find these objects” using reference points.
Psychologist Alan Kamil has a different view. He thinks the birds note the landmarks and remember not so much the distances, but the angles—where one object is in relation to the others. (“The tree stump’s 80 degrees south of the rock.”) These nutcrackers are doing geometry more than measuring.
However they do it, when the snow falls and it’s time to eat, they’ll land at a site. “They will perch on a tree,” says Tomback, “on a low branch, [then light onto the ground, where] they pause, look around a bit, and they start digging, and in a few cases I’ll see them move slightly to the right or to the left and then come up again.”
She’s convinced that they’re remembering markers from summer or fall and using them to point to the X spot—and, “Lo and behold, these birds come up with their cracked seeds,” she says. “And it’s really pretty astounding.”
In the 1970s, Stephen Vander Wall ran a tricky little experiment. He shifted the markers at certain sites, so that instead of pointing to where the seeds actually were, they now pointed to where the seeds were not. Like this …
Drawing by Robert Krulwich
And the birds, as you’d expect if they were triangulating, went to the wrong place.
But at sites where he left the markers untouched, the birds got it right. That’s a clue that each of these birds has thousands of marker-specific snapshots in their heads that they use for months and months. When the spring comes and the birds have their babies, they continue to visit old sites to gather seeds until their chicks fledge.
The mystery here, the deep mystery, is how do they manage to store so much data in their heads? I couldn’t possibly do what they do (I can’t even remember all ten digits in a phone number, so I’d be one very dead nutcracker in no time). Is their brain organized in some unique way?
Is their brain plastic? Can it grow more neurons or more connections when it needs to? Chickadees are also food hiders, and they do grow bushier brains when they need to, expanding in the “remember this” season and contracting afterward. Do Clark’s nutcrackers do that? We don’t know.
Whatever it is they do, I want what they’ve got.
How does it do it?
32 Seeds a Minute
It starts in high summer, when whitebark pine trees produce seeds in their cones—ripe for plucking. Nutcrackers dash from tree to tree, inspect, and, with their sharp beaks, tear into the cones, pulling seeds out one by one. They work fast. One study clocked a nutcracker harvesting “32 seeds per minute.”
These seeds are not for eating. They’re for hiding. Like a squirrel or chipmunk, the nutcracker clumps them into pouches located, in the bird’s case, under the tongue. It’s very expandable …
The pouch “can hold an average of 92.7 plus or minus 8.9 seeds,” wrote Stephen Vander Wall and Russell Balda. Biologist Diana Tomback thinks it’s less, but one time she saw a (bigger than usual) nutcracker haul 150 seeds in its mouth. “He was a champ,” she told me.
Next, they land. Sometimes they peck little holes in the topsoil or under the leaf litter. Sometimes they leave seeds in nooks high up on trees. Most deposits have two or three seeds, so that by the time November comes around, a single bird has created 5,000 to 20,000 hiding places. They don’t stop until it gets too cold. “They are cache-aholics,” says Tomback.
When December comes—like right around now—the trees go bare and it’s time to switch from hide to seek mode. Nobody knows exactly how the birds manage this, but the best guess is that when a nutcracker digs its hole, it will notice two or three permanent objects at the site: an irregular rock, a bush, a tree stump. The objects, or markers, will be at different angles from the hiding place.
Next, they measure. This seed cache, they note, “is a certain distance from object one, a certain distance from object two, a certain distance from object three,” says Tomback. “What they’re doing is triangulating. They’re kind of taking a photograph with their minds to find these objects” using reference points.
Psychologist Alan Kamil has a different view. He thinks the birds note the landmarks and remember not so much the distances, but the angles—where one object is in relation to the others. (“The tree stump’s 80 degrees south of the rock.”) These nutcrackers are doing geometry more than measuring.
However they do it, when the snow falls and it’s time to eat, they’ll land at a site. “They will perch on a tree,” says Tomback, “on a low branch, [then light onto the ground, where] they pause, look around a bit, and they start digging, and in a few cases I’ll see them move slightly to the right or to the left and then come up again.”
She’s convinced that they’re remembering markers from summer or fall and using them to point to the X spot—and, “Lo and behold, these birds come up with their cracked seeds,” she says. “And it’s really pretty astounding.”
In the 1970s, Stephen Vander Wall ran a tricky little experiment. He shifted the markers at certain sites, so that instead of pointing to where the seeds actually were, they now pointed to where the seeds were not. Like this …
Drawing by Robert Krulwich
And the birds, as you’d expect if they were triangulating, went to the wrong place.
But at sites where he left the markers untouched, the birds got it right. That’s a clue that each of these birds has thousands of marker-specific snapshots in their heads that they use for months and months. When the spring comes and the birds have their babies, they continue to visit old sites to gather seeds until their chicks fledge.
The mystery here, the deep mystery, is how do they manage to store so much data in their heads? I couldn’t possibly do what they do (I can’t even remember all ten digits in a phone number, so I’d be one very dead nutcracker in no time). Is their brain organized in some unique way?
Is their brain plastic? Can it grow more neurons or more connections when it needs to? Chickadees are also food hiders, and they do grow bushier brains when they need to, expanding in the “remember this” season and contracting afterward. Do Clark’s nutcrackers do that? We don’t know.
Whatever it is they do, I want what they’ve got.
