LONG-TERM-MEMORY FOR CACHE SITES IN THE BLACK-CAPPED CHICKADEE

Black-capped chickadees, Parus atricapillus, use memory to relocate stored food. Two experiments tested their ability to recover caches after long retention intervals. The first experiment tested performance after delays of 1, 14 and 28 days, and the second after delays of 1, 28, 56 and 84 days. Performance during recovery was compared with the birds' ability to relocate seeds the experimenter had stored, and with the birds' preference to search at particular sites. Chickadees were able to recover their caches after delays of up to 28 days more effectively than in the control conditions. This is longer than the cache-recovery interval found in previous field studies of food-storing parids. This difference may be due to differences between species, to responses to cache pilfering in the wild, or to failure to detect longer cache-recovery intervals in the field. © 1990 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.