London - We already knew that they are rather good at finding their way home.
But it seems that pigeons have another remarkable talent - they can count.
Researchers found the birds could compare pairs of images involving up to nine objects and order them by the lower to higher number.
Until now, only other humans and primates were thought to be able to use abstract numerical rules in this way.
“Our research not only shows that pigeons are also members of this exclusive club, but, somewhat surprisingly, their performance is on a par with that of monkeys,” said Dr Damian Scarf, of the University of Otago in New Zealand.
The researchers initially trained the pigeons by presenting them with 35 sets of three images, each with one, two, or three objects of different size, colour and shape.
They were rewarded with wheat when they pecked the images in the correct ascending sequence. Next, the researchers sought to test if the birds could take what they had learned from ordering the three images and apply it to images with higher numbers of objects than they had seen before. They were presented with pairs of images with between one and nine objects and tested on their ability to respond to them in ascending order.
As well as performing above chance in these tests, the pigeons also demonstrated “distance effect” comparable to that found in landmark US research in 1998 involving rhesus monkeys performing similar tasks.
The greater the distance between the numbers in the pairs, the faster and more accurate the pigeons were, Dr Scarf said in the international journal Science. “While this is obviously a long way away from how humans can count, it shows an animal with a brain structured quite differently to ours is still able to perform complex mental tasks of which only humans were once thought capable.
“Our findings add to a growing body of evidence that pigeons are among a number of avian species exhibiting impressive mental abilities that really do give the lie to the old ‘bird brain’ insult.”
Dr Scarf now plans to test the kea, a New Zealand parrot, which has been claimed to have the intelligence of a six-year-old child. - Daily Mail