Date: 1/7/25 8:33 am From: Ted Levin <tedlevin1966...> Subject: [VTBIRD] 07 January 2025: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), WRJ
7:14 a.m., eight minutes before sunrise (one minute earlier than
yesterday). Wind: west-northwest ten miles per hour, gusting to
twenty-seven, pines stirring and speaking. Sky: flat blue-gray,
textureless, featureless, nearly colorless. Flurries join exhalations of
blown up from the ground, rising and falling. New Hampshire ridgeline ...
occluded. As seen through atmospheric linen, Vermont hills north of the
White River are barely visible.
Chickadees maneuver with summer enthusiasm back and forth from feeders to
lilacs and crabapple. Two sing. Six others store sunflower seeds, one after
the other. Collectively, eight little birds, each weighing less than an
empty can of soda, store and retrieve tens of thousands of seeds throughout
the winter—for me, costly and entertaining; for them, survival—an
adaption a million years in the making. To relocate those seeds, a
cognitive ecologist from the University of Nevada, Reno, determined that a
chickadee's *hippocampus*, the seat of spatial memory, grows every autumn.
Winters are harsher in the north (surprise, surprise). So, a chickadee
living in Vermont needs a larger hippocampus than one living in Virginia
... and it has one.
To grow healthy brains, seasonally capable of three-dimensional memory,
chickadees feed spiders to their young, a rich source of *taurine*, a
nutrient necessary for healthy brain development. Had my mother only known,
I could have been a Hebrew scholar or a card counter in Las Vegas.
