A theory (which I've not seen elsewhere) about such amazing feats of animal memory:
The tiny (~12g) chickadee does not actually remember where its tens of thousands of seeds are. What it (in effect) remembers is a geometric pattern, describing the distribution of those locations - with a bunch of "if there is a convenient crack in a branch within X cm of an allowed pattern locus, then stash a seed there" rules of thumb.
The pattern, plus rules of thumb, can (in effect) be compressed into far less memory than it would need to recall many thousands of discrete locations.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 6.7 ms ] threadThe tiny (~12g) chickadee does not actually remember where its tens of thousands of seeds are. What it (in effect) remembers is a geometric pattern, describing the distribution of those locations - with a bunch of "if there is a convenient crack in a branch within X cm of an allowed pattern locus, then stash a seed there" rules of thumb.
The pattern, plus rules of thumb, can (in effect) be compressed into far less memory than it would need to recall many thousands of discrete locations.