While some birds like pigeons and zebra finches are naturals in the lab, unfazed by human-made environments and devices, others don’t take well to an artificial setting and don’t reveal their true capacities in an experimental setup. Test the memory of a coal or marsh tit with a touchscreen computer in a lab, and it performs miserably, holding in mind an image for at most a few minutes—whereas in the field, it can remember the locations of individual food caches for months.
