Once-pilfered cache sites not avoided by black-capped chickadees

Abstract

Black-capped chickadees, Parus atricapillus, scatter-hoard food and recover items at a later time. Loss of cached food to robbers, however, is high in natural populations. A laboratory study was conducted to determine whether individuals would avoid re-use of storage sites that had been pilfered. Following an initial caching episode, an experimenter pilfered half the store seeds, and allowed the subject to (1)recover remaining unpilfered seeds, (2) discover pilfered sites and (3) cache seeds. In two trials ( N = 16, N = 13), there was no evidence that the subjects avoided pilfered sites when caching the second time. High cache loss and large numbers of potential cache sites in the wild may preclude the evolution of short-term memory for pilfered sites.