Do the birds and the bees actually count? Or is there some more innate/intuitive process involved. I doubt I could tell the difference between 9 or 10 dots on a page without actually counting them.

Many years ago there was a study involving crows, as I recall. N, starting at 2, researchers went into a blind, then N-1 came out. They had to get up to N = 13 before they fooled the birds into thinking the blind was actually empty.