By now, the intelligence of birds is well known. Alex the African gray parrot had great verbal skills. Scrub jays, which hide caches of seeds and other food, have remarkable memories. Pigeons, it turns out, are no slouches either. It was known that they could count. But all sorts of animals, including bees, can count. Pigeons have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability which until now had been demonstrated only in primates.
In the 1990s scientists trained rhesus monkeys to look at groups of items on a screen and rank them from the lowest number of items to the highest.
Damian Scarf, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, tried the same experiment with pigeons, and he and two colleagues report in the journal Science that the pigeons did just as well as the monkeys.
Elizabeth Brannon, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and one of the scientists who did the original experiments with monkeys, was impressed by the new results.
The pigeons had learned an abstract rule - peck images on a screen in order, lower numbers to higher. It may have taken a year of training, with different shapes, sizes and colors of items, always in groups of one, two or three, but all that work paid off when it was time for higher math.
Given groups of six and nine, they could pick, or peck, the images in the right order.
This article appeared on page A - 14 of the San Francisco Chronicle