The kea parrots who can make predictions

It turns out that parrots are pretty good at making decisions and predictions!

In an experiment researchers wanted to see how well they understand probability - that means the likelihood or chance of something happening.

Like humans, the parrots that were involved in the study, were able to make decisions based on probability and even predict events that might take place.

Researchers from the University of Auckland were studying a certain kind of species, called the kea bird, they're a larger parrot found in New Zealand.

They found that the parrots weigh up probabilities to help them make choices, and use knowledge they've already learnt to predict what events might happen in the future.

They even performed better than chimps in some experiments!

Researchers trained six parrots, called Blofeld, Bruce, Loki, Neo, Plankton and Taz to associate black tokens with tasty treats and orange tokens with no rewards.

Each bird was then placed in front of a researcher and two see-through jars filled with black and orange tokens.

In the first experiment, the two jars contained the same overall number of tokens, but one was mainly crammed with black tokens while the other had mostly orange tokens in.

Each bird was tested 20 times on which jar they preferred the researcher to have taken a token from. Overall three birds showed a clear preference - all favouring the jar with more black tokens.

One of the researchers said the kea bird "behave very intelligently" but they "didn't expect them to perform as well as chimpanzees do".

The team said it is the first time this complex cognitive ability has been seen in an animal outside of great apes.