Food Gathering Skillz

This girl has some powerful visual recognition going on. And a whopper of a memory. She'll remember where people left things. And she'll pipe up when we're making out the grocery list with things that we were intending to get.

We were out by the macadamia nut trees (the inlaws have three of them). I had the day previously shown her what a macadamia nut looks like in the husk. Most macadamia nut trees will drop their nuts when they're ripe. But you don't look for the nuts themselves, since there's shells like crazy from the thieving squirrels, and if you find one out of its husk, you have no idea how old it is.

Anyway, we were walking out to the trees and she says "I found one!" right away, pointing a ways off down the driveway. Sure enough, one had rolled down there. She remembered what to look for.

A couple days later, we were under the trees and had fairly well combed the ground for nuts. I was pretty confident we had almost all of them. I asked her, "Do you see any more?"
A second passes. "There's one!"

I look at where she's looking. She's looking up into the tree.
"Wait. Where, honey? Show me again."
"Right there!"

I got down so I could look up along her arm to where she was pointing. Sure enough, on a racime about 10 feet in the air were three macadamia nuts growing right on the tree.

Now, macadamia trees are the gangliest, bushiest trees I've seen in a while, and our trees are at the end of this particular round of nuts -- there aren't that many on them right now. Seeing them on the tree is quite difficult, and it doesn't help that the nuts' husks are green. It's much like a Where's Waldo exercise, but worse.

I explained that we weren't taking those because they aren't ready yet.

"Do you see any more?" One second passes. "There's one!"

And she had spotted another such racime, this time with one nut on it.

This happened a couple more times, just as fast. It takes me on average about 30 seconds to do the same thing.