Parrot defends owner from attacker... Good boy Wunsy

Wunsy the African grey parrot came to the defence of its owner who was attacked while walking in Sunny Hill Park in London

Parrots turn out to be excellent bodyguards, it seems, after Wunsy the African grey defended her owner against an attacker late at night.

The female victim had been taking Wunsy for a walk and fly in Sunny Hill Park, north London, on Friday when she was grabbed by the shoulders and shoved.

"My initial thought was someone's trying to kill my bird," explained Rachel Mancino.

The parrot, who is taken to the park daily in a harness and lead, flapped his wings and squawked, causing the attacker to flee.

"I was happy that my bird was still with me and alive, and glad that I was still alive as well," she said.

Problem solver: An African grey parrot

Their best-known party trick, of course, is mimicking human speech. But it seems parrots have other, less obvious talents.  A study has found that the birds are capable of cool intelligent reasoning at the same level as a four-year-old child.
African greys have been found to be capable of working out the location of hidden food using the kind of deduction and elimination skills  previously seen only in humans and apes.
The discovery means that parrots join a select band of creatures at the pinnacle of animal intelligence. Experiments were carried out on seven African greys aged between seven and 25 years and kept in a rescue centre in Austria.
Sandra Mikolasch of Vienna University said: 'Two different but equally preferred food items were hidden in view of the birds under two opaque cups.
'Then an experimenter secretly removed one food type and showed it to the birds.'
The parrots were then put in front of the two cups.

If they were relying purely on guesswork, the parrots would have chosen the cup containing the remaining piece of food  roughly half the time. Some of them were unable to work out where the food was. But over the course of the experiment, some birds showed a statistically significant - or greater than chance - preference for the cup with the food.

Reporting their findings in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the researchers said the birds spotted which food item had been taken out and worked out which cup must contain the remaining reward
Previously, only apes have been shown to use logical reasoning skills in the same experiment.