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Black-capped Chickadee — printable fact sheet
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Black-capped Chickadee
Poecile atricapillus
A chickadee caches thousands of individual seeds through autumn, hiding each one in a different crevice, and it can recover them weeks later — a memory task that would defeat most animals. To do it, the bird grows its own brain: the hippocampus, the region handling spatial memor…
Did you know?
- Despite their tiny size, Black-capped Chickadees are able to survive harsh northern winters by growing extra brain cells to remember food cache locations.
- On winter nights a chickadee lets its body temperature fall by 10 to 12 degrees Celsius in a regulated hypothermia, saving enough energy to survive a night that its daytime metabolism could not fund. Chickadees excavate their own nest cavities in soft, rotten wood, and carry the wood chips well away from the hole so as not to advertise the site. A bird weighing about 11 g holds a mental map of thousands of cache sites in a brain smaller than a peanut.
What I learned
Draw the black-capped chickadee
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