The amazing pigeon trio!

Newspix / Rex Features via Daily Mail and The Sun.

This is quite amazing. Imagine a trio of pigeons in need of cooling off during a hot summer day in Brisbane, Australia. Believe it or not the three fellows have worked out a clever system of adapting a water fountain built by humans for their very own purposes!
After waiting for the fountain to be free, one bird jumped on the lever and pushed it down to fill up the bowl, while another kept watch and the third splashed in. What a clever birds! and not only clever.. they are also great team-workers infact according to the passers-by when the third pigeon had drunk its fill and cleaned its feathers, it hopped up to the handle and let his friends have a go! The three birds continued their bathing ritual for ten minutes.

Pigeons have a very bad reputation but on the contrary of what many people think thay are amongst the most intelligent birds. Wikipedia has also a very interesting entry about Pigeon Intelligence (click to read it).

I've found a passage totally awesome. It seems that according to some experiments by Watanabe, Sakamoto and Wakita, pigeons are able to distinguish paintings by Monet from paintings by Picasso! Take a read:

The birds were first trained on a limited set of paintings: when the shown painting was a Picasso, the pigeon was able to obtain food by repeated pecking; when it was a Monet, pecking had no effect. After a while, the pigeons would only peck when shown Picasso paintings. They were then able to generalize, and correctly discriminate between paintings of the two painters not previously shown, and even between cubist and impressionist paintings (cubism and impressionism being the two stylistic schools Picasso and Monet belong to). When the Monet paintings were shown upside down, the pigeons were not able to properly categorize anymore; showing the cubist works upside down did not have such an effect.
In a later paper, Watanabe showed that if pigeons and human college students undergo the same training, their performance in distinguishing between Van Gogh and Chagall paintings is comparable.

from WIKIPEDIA