A brief event, experienced only once, can become a memory that lasts a lifetime. To study such “episodic” memories, Dmitriy Aronov’s lab uses a unique memory specialist, the black-capped chickadee. Chickadees are birds that hide extraordinary amounts of food in their environment and use memory to find their caches later in time. Aronov’s lab studies this natural food-caching behavior with an array of neuroscience techniques. They aim to understand the neural processes that occur when the brain forms, and later when it recalls, an episodic memory.