The Nature News Blog reports on a new addition to the non-human numerism literature:

Even in death, the world’s most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot (Psittacus eithacus) trained to count objects – have just been published.

They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight and three sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates. The work was just published in the journal Animal Cognition.