Winter is coming, so some birds are busy gathering seeds and nuts to last through the darkest and coldest days ahead. For some species, that means caching (hoarding) food in a single location, called a larder. This includes Acorn Woodpeckers which stock and guard a communal granary. Other birds, like Black-capped Chickadees and Tufted Titmice, are scatter hoarders which cache food in many locations throughout their territory. Their food is well hidden, so their survival depends on remembering those secret locations in the future.
Recalling a cache site requires advanced episodic memory, the kind of long-term memory that allows humans to remember the details about past experiences in our lives. Researchers have learned that chickadees may be able to catalog thousands of scattered food caches by encoding a unique brain pattern for each location, much like a barcode captures the details of a specific food item in a grocery store.