Benford’s Law and Pigeons

Benford’s law is an immensely curious observation about numbers in mesures of physical phenomena stating that 1 is the most likely (30%) leading digit followed by 2 and so on.

Having mathematics being able to explain things like that means we must be doing something right, but on the other hand why does it feel so remarkable if it is everywhere around us? Should we rethink our number representation? I am fairly certain writing letters and even words sequentially is not optimal, could this be a similar case?

On a related note, it seems that pigeons perceive distances in logarithmic scale.

Update: Zipf’s law is a similar finding dealing with frequency of words in a text.