Intelligent parrots:
It became clear not so long ago that parrots are very intelligent creatures. Scientific findings, such as the studies by Irene Pepperberg, Victoria A. Cussen, Thomas Bugnyar and many others, show what remarkable mental abilities parrot birds have.
The Vienna Goffin Lab (Comparative Cognition / Messerli Research Institute) is currently researching tool use by Goffin’s cockatoos (Alice Auersperg). All these findings lead to a parrot-human comparison that shows that parrots can solve tasks that human children up to the age of about eight have problems with!
Results such as these show even more emphatically how important it is to campaign against cage confinement of parrots. They need mental stimulation and social interaction with conspecifics. They otherwise develop abnormal behavior in captivity, such as feather plucking, apathy or stereotypies (pathological repetition of movements)!
Here are further links to current publications:
The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots (Pepperberg, I. M., 1999)
Psitácidos mexicanos Asociación Civil (Psitamex)