Scatter-hoarding animals establish their food caches and recover them by using olfactory,spatial memory or both.It is proposed that food hoarding animals show advantages over pilferers to recover their caches due to spatial memory when storing food.Here,we,using scatter-hoarding animal Siberian chipmunks Tamias sibiricus,test this prediction in the semi-natural enclosures.Contrary to previous prediction,our results showed that Siberian chipmunks selectively recovered artificial caches over their own caches.Moreover,Siberian chipmunks reserved their own caches even under intraspecific interferences.However,pilferers (animals unfamiliar with those caches) showed no preference to find the artificial caches and those established by focal animals either with or without intraspecific interferences.Our results,at first time,show that scatter-hoarding animals prefer to reserve rather than recover their own caches based on spatial memory.The behavior of cache reservation by Siberian chipmunks and maybe others is expected to increase cache pilferage among food hoarding animals.