Hummingbirds' huge memory lets them remember the location of every flower in their territory



They may be tiny, but hummingbirds have a huge memory, researchers have found.

Their hippocampus – the area of the brain responsible for learning and memory – is up to five times bigger than that in songbirds, seabirds and woodpeckers.

This might explain why hummingbirds are such skilled foragers.

Featherbrain: The tiny hummingbird has a huge memory, scientists have discovered

The birds can remember where every flower in their territory is and how long it takes to refill with nectar after they have fed.

Hummingbirds weigh only 0.7 ounces or less but are known to be extremely smart with a brain larger in comparison to body size than any other bird.

They also remember year to year where each feeder is, both at home and along a migration path.



Females have been observed watching older ones building a nest to learn some tricks and tips, and possibly steal some material.



And they learn which people are the ones responsible for filling hummingbird feeders, and which ones don’t.

By remembering their food source and the last time they visited it they can actually plan with some precision. This is known as episodic memory and was previously considered exclusive to humans.

Animal psychologist Dr Andrew Iwaniuk, of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, said: 'Hummingbirds visit hundreds of flowers per day.

'In order to feed efficiently, they must remember what flowers they have visited, the locations of high nectar-rewarding flowers and a host of additional spatial-temporal information.

The birds can remember where every flower in their territory is and how long it takes to refill with nectar after they have fed

'A combination of field and laboratory studies demonstrate that hummingbirds can remember the nectar quality and content of individual flowers, nectar-refilling rates, spatial location and distribution of flowers, avoid revisiting recently sampled flowers and rely on ‘episodic-like’ memory for daily foraging.'

In the first study of its kind his team dissected the brains of several types of wild hummingbirds and their sister species the Common Swift and compared them with data on the hippocampus formation of 77 other species of birds.

Dr Iwaniuk said: 'Both field and laboratory studies demonstrate hummingbirds have exceptional spatial memory. Our analyses reveal the HF in hummingbirds is significantly larger, relative to volume, than any bird examined to date.

'When expressed as a percentage of volume, the hummingbird HF is two to five times larger than that of songbirds, seabirds and woodpeckers.

'This HF expansion in hummingbirds probably underlies their ability to remember the location, distribution and nectar content of flowers, but more detailed analyses are required to determine the extent to which this arises from an expansion of HF or a decrease in size of other brain regions.'

Scientists believe the hummingbird’s brain has become extremely developed because they travel long distances and don’t have time and energy to waste looking for food.

The study is published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.



