Smart mountain chickadees live longer, longest wild cognition study shows

A tiny songbird that weighs about as much as a pencil is proving that being smarter really does help you live longer.

Researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno, trekking year-round to the Sagehen Creek Field Station in California’s Sierra Nevada — by snowmobile when necessary — have tracked the memory of wild mountain chickadees for over a decade.

The site hosts one of the longest running studies of animal cognition in the wild, testing up to 250 birds annually with automated feeder arrays. Each array has eight feeders with gates that only open to certain tagged birds, so chickadees must remember which feeder is theirs. Birds that make fewer wrong landings score higher.

In a study published in Science, the team followed 227 mountain chickadees over ten years and found birds with better spatial learning and memory — the ability to remember where they cached tens of thousands of pine seeds for winter — had a significant survival advantage.”Animals have two interests. They want to survive, and they want to reproduce, so the smart thing for them to do is whatever allows those two things to happen,” said Carrie Branch, behavioral ecologist and lead author.

The work also uncovered a genetic basis. By sequencing genomes of 162 tagged birds, collaborators at CU Boulder identified 97 genes linked to spatial memory, many involved in neuron formation in the hippocampus, the brain’s learning and memory center.

The team says harsh winters and strong selection at high elevation have shaped these abilities. In a related finding, the birds showed no age-related decline in spatial cognition from one to six years old — the first such finding in a wild species.