“A chickadee on a winter night burns through all the calories it ate during the day. Before dawn, as soon as there’s light enough to see, the chickadee flutters out, famished, its tiny brain intent on seeds.
Tiny, its brain, but bigger now, in Advent, than in spring… Inside that black skullcap his hippocampus is bulged with a precise map of his half-mile territory, an X marking each flap of tree bark or log crack where he’s stashed a seed. Since late summer his brain’s memory center has been growing, adding neurons to record the location of every single cached seed—thousands of them. As he eats them up through the rest of winter, the map and his hippocampus will shrink. Will the seed map be gone before the ice and snow?”
–Gayle Boss, All Creation Waits: the Advent Mystery of New Beginnings, p. 11
