JMA-PSOS

Two days before the new year, it's 5C and raining. A group of about half-dozen dozen starlings were taking turns bathing in a puddle in our back yard, a squirrel was hopping along the drainage ditch, a red cardinal flew across the clearing and a few blue jays were flying near the starlings being their usual impish selves. As me and Eddie approached the starlings, they first flew and perched on the nearby crabapple and birch saplings. As we got closer, they moved along the ditch into the neighbor's willow and then further along in the tree canopies as we kept moving in their direction.

When we reached the five-paces long and narrow clearing kept by our neighbors along the ditch on the currently unopened (formerly open) dirt road (that is flanked by trees on both sides and trails into dense bushes and eventually ends into a cross-ditch interrupting the road), many chickadees (or similar small birds) kept swooping between bushes and small saplings, flashing their underwing white feathers as the jays and a squirrel played along slightly higher up in the trees.

Eventually, the starlings flew away from the ditch and back to where they came from, the chickadees momentarily disappeared in the thicket, and only the jays and the squirrel remained within sight.

As we turned back and came out of the clearing, a few chickadees appeared again jumping between the short bushes near the pond and, in the distance, near the main road, another squirrel ran and skipped alongside it in its typical squirrely way.

Very closely, but out of sight, two small ponies (Pearl and Bentley) and one chestnut mare (Luna) are nibbling on fresh hay, and one small deer mouse (Millie) is sleeping in its labyrinth after a typical busy night.

Quirks and Quarks covered how chickadees form “bar codes” in their hippocampi when they store and retrieve seeds from their caches. They first employ these place cells (I.e. geospatial indexes) and then for a brief second they fire a unique pattern the scientists called “bar codes” (i.e. hashes) unique for each cache. The scientists posit that other animals including humans use similar techniques.