Recent experiments show that Eurasian store food that will later be unavailable to them in the future. Although they are not the first birds to be seen doing this, this is the first definitive proof of it happening. Animals planning for future events are called “mental time travel.” Previous experiments showed that the jays would store the food away after being fed so much of it that they became sick of it. However, the birds may have just figured out which foods store better than others. This new experiment was designed to get rid of that possibility. On the first day of the experiment, the birds were given two boxes to hide food, which is the mixed pile of raisins and peanuts. On day two, they were only given one box and were only given raisins and on day three were only given the other box and peanuts. On the final day, they were fed a pile of peanuts until they were sick of them and then allowed to go store food. Instead of completely ignoring the peanuts, they stored both foods in separate boxes because they planned ahead. This shows how the jays thought that the food may be unavailable in the future and since they will not eat it now, they will be better off storing it.
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