cache
KASH
A store of food hidden by an animal for later retrieval — a squirrel's buried acorn, a mountain lion's kill covered with leaves and debris, a Clark's nutcracker's thousands of pine seed hoards, a shrike's prey impaled on a thorn. Caching is memory made physical: the animal must remember where it hid the food, sometimes months later, sometimes under snow. Some caches are never retrieved, and from those forgotten stores, new trees grow.
Etymology
French cacher, to hide, possibly from Latin coactare, to press together, to store. The word entered English through the fur trade — trappers and voyageurs cached supplies along their routes.
Notes
The Clark's nutcracker can cache up to 33,000 seeds in a season and retrieve them months later with remarkable accuracy. The whitebark pines of the high Rockies depend on the nutcracker's forgotten caches for regeneration.
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