Irene M. Pepperberg entered a Northwest Side pet shop in June of 1977 and left with a haughty 1-year-old African Grey parrot she named Alex.
When Alex died in 2007, his “obituary” was published in newspapers around the world, his death reported on CNN. The respected British newsmagazine the Economist ran a 900-word essay on his life.
And a British newspaper, The Guardian, called Alex “smarter than the average U.S. president.”
In their 30 years together, Pepperberg and Alex countered conventional wisdom about how animals think, challenging the notion that “bird brain” was pejorative.
The relationship between the two is the subject of a new book by Pepperberg, “Alex and Me,” published in November by Collins/HarperCollins.
An earlier, and more scientific book by Pepperberg, “The Alex Studies,” was published in 2000.
The night before he died, as Pepperberg left her lab at Brandeis University, the bird told her, “You be good. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” replied Pepperberg.
The bird asked her, “You’ll be in tomorrow?”
Pepperberg’s work, some of it conducted at Northwestern University, argued that even creatures that aren’t primates or mammals and that have only walnut-sized brains could learn communication at least as well as chimps. Parrots are capable of mimicking human speech — that had been loudly apparent for centuries — but also of expression and intention.
“Almost everything that Alex did was a breakthrough in avian intelligence,” said Pepperberg, in a phone interview from her home in suburban Boston.
Pepperberg recalled entering the now defunct Noah’s Ark near O’Hare three decades ago. She chose the shop because the birds there were bred domestically at a time when parrots were often illegally caught in the wild and shipped to the U.S. under harsh conditions. She also had the shop owner choose one “so people couldn’t say I had picked the smartest.”
Alex learned colors, could identify how many objects were present up to six and knew wood from wool and paper. In all, he learned some 100 words, could identify 50 objects and when he wanted something, he asked for it: food by name (rejecting substitutes), “wanna go to gym” or “go see tree.” When he tired of exercises — say naming colors or counting — he would give every answer but the right one in protest.
One night, the bird asked a visitor to Pepperberg’s lab, “You want nut?” No, said the visitor. “You want corn?” he asked. No. He continued to offer a variety of foods until finally saying, “Well, what do you want?” Alex was known to correct other parrots’ language, telling them to “talk better.”
Pepperberg doesn’t believe Alex was necessarily smarter than most parrots but that he was an example of the potential birds have if taught. Before Alex, “people didn’t think birds were capable of much of anything.”
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