What the Chickadee Knows

by Dacia Price


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Every autumn a Chickadee’s hippocampus -- that part of the brain tasked with spatial awareness and memory -- grows by 30% before shrinking back down to normal proportions. Ornithologists explain this pattern of expansion and contraction by pointing to the Chickadee’s need to remember where it has stored food during the winter months. Food caching birds, Ornithologists point out, require better memories than non-food caching birds due to their need to survive when resources are scarce. Still, there are many species of birds within this food-caching category and Chickadees remain outliers when it comes to brain growth. Perhaps this is due to climate or food choice or caching practices or body size. I am not an Ornithologist and so I do not know.  

Those who may know say that Chickadees can hide up to 100,000 individual seeds over a territory that spans miles, an impressive enough figure, but a Chickadee’s recall isn’t limited to location. It is also able to remember which seed is stored in which site, creating an immediately accessible brain map guiding them to seeds that contain (for example) the highest amount of fat or protein so that as winter gets particularly harsh, the seeds a Chickadee un-caches provide the most nutrition. “Chickadee brains don’t just grow in volume,” says famed Ornithologist Dr Fernado Nottebohm of New York’s Rockefeller University, “they actually discard old brain cells holding old memories and replace them with new cells that hold fresh memories.” Chickadees, Nottebohm suggests, could hold the key to the treatment of degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s. 



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The house in which I grew up stood at a bend on a suburban street where all the houses were built at once. Our driveway sloped toward the garage at an angle that asked visitors to park on the street. My father said this is because the contractor had the wrong plans and so poured the wrong foundation on the wrong lot. When I pointed nextdoor’s same driveway, my father said the contractor must have poured our foundations at the same time, doubling the mistake. Neither my father nor I were there when the houses were built and so we have no memory for the moment of foundation pouring. Everything my father said was speculative.

Memories I have about the house: it had white siding and red brick so that at a distance the combination gave the illusion of a whitening of the red and a reddening of the white. When guiding new friends over for the first time, I told them to look for the big pink house at the bend in the road // the apple tree in the backyard produced apples that were neither robust nor sweet enough for eating but attracted swarms of wasps that stung our feet if we forgot to wear shoes when the ground became littered with fruit // once, when the garage was left open overnight, a mother skunk snuck inside and gave birth to a litter of baby skunks who climbed in and through the trash bins and hid under piles of old drop cloths. My father put on a coat and hat and ski mask and gloves and boots when he went in to shoo them out. He had to climb under shelves and move heavy tool chests in order to reach each one. It sounded like all the things inside were breaking at once. After, the smell was so strong that my mother made us keep the windows open for a week even though it was still winter and the snow blew in through the screens.



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Jill Price can remember everyday of her life so that when asked (for example) what she was doing on August 29 1980, she can answer,  “I went to Palm Springs with my friends, twins, Nina and Michelle, and their family for Labour Day weekend.” She was 14 years and eight months old.

Jill was the first person to be diagnosed with hyperthymesia, a disorder that prevents her from forgetting. She was 34 years and five months old when doctors first named her remembering as something new even though she had been living with it for her whole life.



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My father married his second wife eleven months after my mother died. My parents had been married for 24 years; only one of which came after her cancer diagnosis. His first wedding was held in my grandparents’ backyard. Both he and my mother wore flowers; her’s ringed her long brown hair while my father’s were pinned to his lapel. I do not know what kind of flowers. The photograph is aged and the flowers are out of focus. His second wedding took place beside the lake where he and my mother spent every summer. Their reception was inside a barn that had been cleaned and decorated for the occasion with long wooden picnic tables and hanging silver stars and twinkle lights suspended from the ceiling so that it felt like we were huddling beneath an elaborate, shimmering web.

When he talks about the lake now its history begins with this second wedding, as though it arrived fully formed that morning. When I ask about the summers we spent as a family, swimming and hiking he tells me stories about the work he has done on the deck or the trip he and his second wife are planning. “The place is big enough now,” he says, “for you to visit.” This is the closest he comes to past tense; the closest we get to remembering. 



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In 2019 at a meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Chicago, ecologist Vladimir Pravosudov presented his group’s research into the spatial awareness and memory of Chickadees living in the Sierra Nevada mountains to a gathered crowd so eager to listen that space was limited to standing-room only. What everyone was waiting to hear was how Pravosudov and his team of graduate students discovered a correlation between a Chickadee’s ability to remember and the length of its survival. Although the theory about memory and longevity had persisted in the scientific community, this was the first time data was able to show that an individual bird’s spatial memory had a direct impact on the amount of time it lived.

Pravosudov’s team built an experimental contraption that used radio-frequency identification technology and electronic leg bands to test individual birds’ memory in the wild, then they tracked the bird’s lifespan. His team found that birds with the best memory were most likely to survive the winter. But Pravosudov didn’t stop there. His team also compared these Mountain Chickadees to those living in Alaska under the assumption that harsher winters might necessitate better memory as food scarcity increases with a drop in temperature and an increase in snow accumulation. Here again, his team confirmed their suspicions: birds from Alaska had better memory, a larger hippocampus, and more neurons than their Sierra Nevada counterparts.



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After their honeymoon my father moved into his wife’s house and put ours up for sale. I had left years before. So had my brother. But my sister stayed until the new owners were ready to move in. In this isolation she began to quietly gather our mother’s things into her room until the only empty space was a hole in the bedding perfectly shaped to hold her body. When my aunt arrived to help her move she noted my sister’s collection but said nothing. Together they carefully packed up each item and placed it into a box. Our mother’s clothing, her jewelry, photo albums and artwork, a shampoo bottle and old sewing kit, each was treated with the same care. Later, after my sister and her collection had been tucked safely behind the door of her first new apartment, my aunt would confide to me that maybe my sister had been too young when our mother died; that she hadn’t had enough time to grow up.



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When Jill Price first decided to reach out to neurologist and researcher Dr James McGaugh she wrote him an email. “I have a problem with my memory,” she wrote. If Dr McGaugh had been a different kind of person, one who filters his email so that his attention was focused only on those of clearest and most obvious import, Jill’s email may have become buried, ignored, or sent unopened into the trash. Instead, McGaugh responded with an apology, he isn’t that kind of doctor,” he wrote, but Jill, undaunted, responded by writing: “Whenever I see a date I automatically go back to that day and remember where I was, what I was doing, what day it fell on and on and on and on and on. It is non-stop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.” She was 41 years and two months old.



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Beyond survival, a Chickadee’s memory also plays a role in its communication and according to Pravosudov, its mating. Chickadees are prolific singers known for sixteen distinct vocalizations, the most common is the one from which they get their name: chicka-dee-dee-dee. This song, Ornithologists agree, changes its meaning based on season, note inflection, and terminal dees. Chickadees use this song as an alarm call, increasing the repeated dees to correspond to the perceived level of threat. A pygmy owl -- the top predator of small songbirds like Chickadees --  can elicit upwards of 25 additional dees at the call’s typical terminus. Birds living alongside Chickadees have learned to heed this warning, taking shelter and silencing their calls until the predator passes.

The second most common vocalization is that of the male Black-Capped Chickadee. Most often heard in late winter and early spring, this song -- known by ornithologists as the fee-dee call -- is associated with attracting a mate. Outside the scientific community this song is sometimes called hey sweety because of the way its tones imitate the sound of the words.

As Pravosudov and his team were collecting longevity data on their Sierra Nevada Chickadees they discovered an as-yet unexplained correlation between the birds with the most enlarged hippocampus and bigger clutches of eggs and subsequent broods. For this population of birds it seems that males with the largest hippocampus are not just more successful at attracting a mate, but also in producing offspring.  A potential explanation is that variation in cognition is somehow indicated by male song quality, though “memory,” Pravosudov speculates, “might simply be an investment in the future.”

In the backyard of our pink house at the bend in the road, my mother and I listen for the hey sweety call in spring. For us it’s the Black-Capped Chickadee’s mating call rather than the Robin’s song that confirms the end of winter. “Hey sweety,” my mom would say, “what should we have for dinner?”



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Things I think I know about memory: the more emotionally resonate an experience, the more likely I am to remember it // people don’t remember what I say, they remember how I make them feel // memory works like a camera, recording life in a linear way to be retrieved when I need to retrieve it // aromas and sounds are the best triggers for recalling forgotten memories; sight are touch are the worst. I do not know how taste fares on the memory recall spectrum  // a memory changes each time it is accessed so that my most remembered memory must also be my most altered //



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My sister’s apartment is furnished with the entirety of our childhood home save a painting and a few photo albums my father was able to extract when she wasn’t looking. She keeps the windows closed and the blinds drawn so that the aroma inside is heavy with the smell of unwashed fabric, dust, and the slow decay of food waste. Occasionally she’ll light a scented candle which acts only to enclose the space further and I cannot bring myself to walk inside without also keeping my hand on the door knob; I cannot bring myself to breathe in through my nose. She has our mother’s grandfather clock in the corner of the living room; our kitchen table is now her kitchen table; our mother’s dresser and nightstand have been added to the edge of the apartment’s built-in cabinets, lengthening and distorting the kitchen so that its boundaries are made impossible to point out. On every wall my mother’s face stares out at me from a series of portraits my sister removed from the remaining albums, enlarged, and framed. More portraits can be found on every surface that isn’t occupied by the trinkets my sister believes our mother loved. She wears our mother’s robe and pajamas. She sleeps in our mother’s bedding. When we speak it is always about things that have already taken place.



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The gargling song is made by all species of Chickadee but is not really considered to be a song at all because it lacks the distinctive whistle of the black-capped fee dee. The gargle vocalization is mostly used to enforce a Chickadee’s territory and to admonish other birds for getting too close. In the absence of an adult tutor, Chickadees in captivity do not develop proper gargle calls and so cannot effectively communicate with their wild counterparts when re-introduced. The window for learning vocalizations is limited to a Chickadee’s youth.



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Although Jill Price is the first person to be diagnosed with hyperthymesia, she is not the only one. There are at least 60 other individuals in the world with the same inability to forget. When these individuals are placed inside MRI machines, their brains don’t show any significant divergence from the brains of people with average memories except that the areas most often associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder are activated. Researchers have speculated that perhaps these patients suffer from an obsessive or compulsive recalling of memory. In fact, most individuals with a hyperthymesia diagnosis have a point of origin; a date from which they stopped forgetting but before which they forgot in a more neurotypical way. For Jill it was the date she learned she was moving from New Jersey to California. So sure was she that her New Jersey memories would eventually be replaced with new ones made in California, that she began the methodic -- and obsessive -- retrieval of all memories she could still access. She was eight years and six months old.



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Things my father no longer remembers: my birthday //  smoking in the house everyday until I was seventeen when he suddenly and without explanation, began chewing gum instead // that my sister wasn’t always this way //

Things my father thinks he remembers but doesn’t: how old I am // never smoking in the house // my sister always being like this // our mother telling him to marry the woman he would go on to marry // her forgiveness in the end //



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The first time I forgot the sound of my mother’s voice was the same moment I first remembered our last conversation. It happened suddenly and without warning while I was making coffee or doing the dishes or walking the dog; something that caused my mind to wander and search for a thing upon which to think. The thing it found was a phone call made by my father in the last days of my mother’s life.

It was a short call, lasting less than five minutes, though perhaps it was twenty, or maybe an hour. When my mind landed on the memory my father was already saying that my mother wanted to speak to me but when he pressed the phone to her ear she simply asked, “how are you?” I do not remember what I said, though it was probably unremarkable. She was silent; a gathering of thoughts or energy or cognition before, again: “How are you?”

Memory can be convincing; it fills holes with constructed details without the rememberer’s consent so that when recalled it appears intact; whole and unaltered, but when looked at more closely the patchwork becomes easy to spot. Memory distorted her voice so that she was speaking to me through an impossibly distant phone line // with a mouth full of cotton // from behind some barrier // by an actor cast to speak in her place. Her persistent and repeated questioning, the urgency with which she asked it; this earworm reverberated and with each repeat my mother’s voice became less recognizable. She was the word that loses its meaning after a hundred repetitions and I believe I may have simply constructed the sound on my own; a fragment in a failing memory.



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Things I can still remember // my mother’s habit of sitting on the floor instead of a chair in every room regardless of the setting, making her the favorite of babies and dogs // the way she fell asleep on the couch at the end of a family gathering; a glass of wine in one hand and a cup of tea in the other // cooking and quality time as her love language; her handwritten recipes on torn paper are still taped to the inside of a book she gave me labeled Recipes from Home (also in her handwriting) // the way she laughed with her full body, thrown back head and mouth open wide // her love affair with soft pink and baby blue and lace trimmed fabric // how she could never get through the telling of a joke without dissolving into giggles // how distorted her body became, all stretched out limbs and swollen skin so that is was both smaller and larger than any body has a right to be // the soft machine sounds of her heartbeat and breath as she slept // her sisters painting her toenails red ignoring their new shape and her deterioration // our laughter // her smile // the delicacy with which we tried to carry her //

Dacia Price (she/her) is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University where she teaches composition and is associate editor for Passages North. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pacifica Literary Review, New Limestone Review, Roadrunner Review, Storm Cellar Quarterly, and others. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net in both 2019 and 2020 and in 2022 she won the Roadrunner Prize for Nonfiction.