I believe they do.

The genetics for intelligence are shaped by the environment in which they develop, or more specifically by the selective pressures culling them.

Having along memory and being observant and reactive keeps feral pigeons fed and out of the talons of local raptors.

And how much human intervention they can depend on shapes this too.

The Windsor Spring Bridge Pigde, for example, are regularly fed by the local community at the goodwill parking lot.

All the food is meant for the pigeons, but a lot of it is human food they can't digest.

But the crows can.

So the crows and pigeons co-forage that goodwill parking lot, and provide each other an early warning system.

The Windsor Spring flock is wary, but generally very curious.

The Deans Bridge Pidge are not fed by much of anyone.

They are lean, watchful, and hyperreactive.

Of the two, birds from the Deans Bridge flock seem to pick up new information faster: because they have to.

There are no regular feedings to fall back on, and they are in direct competition with the local murder of crows, who absolutely will take them as prey if they can, so they have to be much more observant and cautious in their search for food.

Comparing them with our domestics in regards to companionship is sort of apples and oranges, because pigeons in human care have no pressures but the ones by which we select who gets to breed and who doesn't.

We decide for them, and what to select for and away from in companion birds depends on what you want from them.

I want a working animal smart enough to think independently, biddable enough to instinctively look to their handler for instruction when possible, with an innate interest in human companionship to act as the foundation of a lifelong bond, because my end goal is service work.

By James Gorman, NY Times, December 22, 2011 By now, the intelligence of birds is well known. Alex the African gray parrot had great verbal skills. Scrub jays, which hide caches of seeds and other food, have remarkable memories. And New Caledonian crows make and use tools in ways that would put the average home plumber to shame.

Pigeons, it turns out, are no slouches either. It was known that they could count. But all sorts of animals, including bees, can count. Pigeons have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability that until now had been demonstrated only in primates. In the 1990s scientists trained rhesus monkeys to look at groups of items on a screen and to rank them from the lowest number of items to the highest.

They learned to rank groups of one, two and three items in various sizes and shapes. When tested, they were able to do the task even when unfamiliar numbers of things were introduced. In other words, having learned that two was more than one and three more than two, they could also figure out that five was more than two, or eight more than six.

Damian Scarf, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, tried the same experiment with pigeons, and he and two colleagues report in the current issue of the journal Science that the pigeons did just as well as the monkeys.

Elizabeth Brannon, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, and one of the scientists who did the original experiments with monkeys, was impressed by the new results. "Their performance looks just like the monkeys'," she said.

Score one for the birds. The pigeons had learned an abstract rule: peck images on a screen in order, lower numbers to higher. It may have taken a year of training, with different shapes, sizes and colors of items, always in groups of one, two or three, but all that work paid off when it was time for higher math.

Given groups of six and nine, they could pick, or peck, the images in the right order. This is one more bit of evidence of how smart birds really are. "I was surprised," Dr. Scarf said.