Clever Eurasian jays plan for the future

Experiments with Eurasian jays have shown that the birds store food that they will want in the future - "planning" for their impending needs.

The study revealed that birds would stash more of the foods that they knew would be unavailable to them on forthcoming foraging trips.

Jays are not the first birds to show that they might have the capacity for what is known as "mental time travel".

But previous claims that birds "plan" in this way have been controversial.

The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.

To find out if the jays thought about the future, the scientists exploited the birds' habit of hiding or "caching" food for later.

In previous studies on Eurasian jays' distant relatives, scrub jays, Prof Nicola Clayton from the University of Cambridge showed that when the birds were offered so much of one food that they became sick of it, they would still store it away in their cache.

She and her team interpreted this to mean that the birds knew they would want that food in the future.

"The difficulty though, is that we don't know what they know, we only know what they're doing," explained Lucy Cheke, a researcher who works with Prof Clayton and who carried out this latest experiment.

The scrub jays, Ms Cheke explained, might just have worked out which foods stored well and which did not. With their new experiment, the scientists wanted to eliminate the possibility that the birds were using this simple rule.

To do this, the researchers put four adult jays through their intellectual paces in a complicated four-day test.

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature

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