Grey parrot was colourful at maths

SMALL PRINT:BACK IN 2010 we were fascinated by Paul the octopus and his ability to "predict" the winners in matches in the Fifa World Cup. And who couldn't be charmed by Uggie, the canine star of The Artist? But have you heard of Alex, the not-so-bird-brained parrot that could do maths?

A paper out this month in Animal Cognition suggests that the grey parrot ( Psittacus erithacus) was a bit of a whizz at addition, but unfortunately the bird died before the experiments could be finished.

Alex’s owner and primary trainer Irene Pepperberg at Harvard had previously worked with him on communication (he had a vocabulary of more than 100 words) and had found he could put numbers in sequence and add two groups of objects up to a total of six objects.

The new paper describes a series of further experiments that indicate Alex could add numbers and count three sets of objects.

Alex died in September 2007 at the age of 31, while the study was under way.

“Although his death precluded testing on all possible arrays, his accuracy was statistically significant and suggested addition abilities comparable with those of non-human primates,” writes Pepperberg in the journal paper.

Quoted in the journal Nature earlier this month, she laments his loss: “I wish that Alex had lived longer and I think this is an important study because it showed what he could do and where he was going.”