Alex & Me - How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process

by Irene Pepperberg

  Of course, most people had never met Alex, perhaps didn’t have a bird of their own, but nevertheless were moved by him in some way, helped by him in some way. One letter is especially poignant:

  “This is a true story,” it began. “Back in the late 1980s, a woman in her mid-thirties was diagnosed with a complicated heart arrhythmia that couldn’t be fixed, could barely be controlled, and was severe enough that every incident could possibly be fatal. As a result, she could do very little. She lost what seemed like almost everything—her hope to have a baby, her career, the ability to do some of the simplest activities. Because her husband traveled for his job, she was alone quite a lot. As someone whose life had been full of activities and goals, the sudden emptiness of the future was unbearable. She often looked at the medication that kept her alive and thought about just not taking it.

  “Then she read an article about an amazing parrot named Alex and his equally amazing mentor, Dr. Irene Pepperberg. To the woman, who loved animals a great deal, the work that Alex and Irene were doing together was so interesting, so unique and important that she had to know as much about it as she could. To think that a parrot could not only speak, but could know—could absolutely understand—what he heard and what he said, was a miracle in itself to the woman who had stopped believing in miracles. So, for the first time since her illness, the woman set herself a goal: to experience for herself the miracle that Alex and Irene were proving to the world of science.

  “I know this story is true because it’s mine. Nearly two decades later, after an experimental surgery and its disabling complications, I’m still here, still following the work done by The Alex Foundation. My own parrots (including, of course, a sixteen-year-old African Grey) are still a miracle to me with every word they speak. They are still my lifeline.

  “But it was Alex and Irene who threw that lifeline out for me to catch, so many years ago.

  “To Irene and all members of The Alex Project, my heartfelt prayers go out to you. Be sure that Alex will never be forgotten by those of us whose hearts have been touched by this amazing little soul.” The message was signed Karen “Wren” Grahame. I later discovered that this was the same Wren who had been sending a $10 check to The Alex Foundation every month for years. I had never before known her backstory.

  “I was never fortunate enough to meet Alex or Dr. Pepperberg but I feel as if I have known them for along time,” wrote Denise Raven, of Belton, Missouri. “This breaks my heart; I have a lump in my throat, and a terrible sense of loneliness inside. It is amazing how deeply this little guy touched so many lives. I thank God for being able to have Alex, Dr. Pepperberg, and The Alex Foundation be a part of my life. I lost my only child 4 years ago and I have to say that this pain of losing Alex hits me as hard as losing my child. I just can’t seem to shake the pain. All I can say is that…you made this world a better place and you are so missed here.”

  “My heart feels broken today,” said Patti Alexakis. “Alex stole my heart many years ago. He was a little prince—a bright shining star. Godspeed, Alex. You are a much beloved Grey and will forever remain in my heart and many others. I’ve a started an Internet memorial candle for you, Alex—and for your loving humans. Please light a candle if you wish.”

  Bill Kollar’s tribute was, I have to say, one of the more unusual and loving ones that Alex received. Kollar is an engineer in northern Virginia and is head of a band of church bell ringers. “On September 16, the bells of Calvary Church in Frederick, Maryland, rang to Alex’s memory,” he wrote in his e-mail. Kollar owns an African Grey and knew of Alex; so too did his band of ringers, apparently. “One of my professional rules is that you should always ask people to do what they are good at,” he later said. “As for bell ringers, when a significant event occurs, such as Alex’s death, we ring.” And so they did, a forty-three-minute-long quarter-peal combination on the church’s six newly hung bells, an unearthly sound winging across the countryside—a beautiful thought. I worry that I never managed to send him a thank-you; even now, I can’t remember to whom I wrote during those dark days.

  “I cannot begin to tell you how deeply I feel for you,” wrote Mother Dolores Hart. “I am a member of the Abbey of Regina Laudis community of Benedictine contemplative nuns, in Bethlehem, Connecticut. We have a Grey who we love so much and who has kept me in close awareness of you and your work. Your sudden loss is heartbreaking. We will keep you in our prayers and our love of these wondrous creatures who have shown us something more of God than we could have ever believed possible.” Mother Hart is the abbey’s prioress, a former Hollywood actress who had the distinction of playing opposite Elvis Presley in two films and starred in the 1960 classic Where the Boys Are. She left the glamour of film and entered the Abbey of Regina Laudis four decades ago, and has had the company of an African Grey for the past seventeen years.

  I tried to read as many of this torrent of e-mails as possible, but often I could not, either because other demands took my time or because it was so very hard. Occasionally Arlene Levin-Rowe, my wonderful lab manager, got Alex’s trainers and caregivers together in the lab for collective readings. It was always emotional. How could it not be? There we were in the smallish room at Brandeis that housed three cages: Griffin’s, the one nearest the door; Wart’s, to the right and the back; and the third cage, to the left and back of the room, with parrot toys scattered here and there, cage door open. Empty. This final e-mail I will share with you was one of those we read as a group. Its message prompted more tears than usual, for Alex and for the messenger whose heart he touched so dearly:

  “I just wanted to write this and say that I have been suffering from a clinical depression for weeks, very numb inside despite being surrounded by a loving family and nearly two hundred beloved pets, my children, and grandbabies. Since I learned of Alex’s death I have been reading the e-mails on the Web site, and tears are finally flowing. It is just another way Alex impacted the world. I forgot how to feel emotions, and reading Alex’s nighttime words to his dearly beloved friend [i.e., “I love you”] opened the floodgates for me. Thank you, Alex, for touching my heart and helping me to feel again.” The person who wrote these words was Deborah Younce, of Michigan.

  Regular mail began to arrive as well, eventually boxes upon boxes upon boxes of it. One note was a beautiful card from Penny Patterson and friends, owner of the famous signing gorilla Koko. “Koko sends a message with the color of healing,” Penny wrote. “Please know you are all in our thoughts and prayers—Alex’s passing is a great loss to all.” Below Penny’s words was an orange squiggle, executed by Koko. Another note came from my friend and colleague Roger Fouts, longtime trainer and companion of Washoe, the famous signing chimp. “We know how you must feel,” he said. “However, we are all getting old, and in our case we feel fortunate that Washoe has stayed with us as long as she has.” Sadly, not too many weeks would go by before I sent Roger my condolences on Washoe’s passing.

  Treva Mathur of Trees for Life, in Wichita, Kansas, sent me a certificate indicating that a gift of ten trees had been made to the foundation by the Windhover Veterinary Center, in Walpole, Massachusetts—a beautiful means for transforming kind thoughts into sustainable ecosystems. Alex had been an occasional (and reluctant) patient at Windhover.

  But one of the most precious items that came in the mail was a package from Butler Elementary School in Lockport, Illinois. It contained about two dozen folders, each handmade by the children in Mrs. Karen Kraynak’s fourth-grade class. On the front of each simple folder was the child’s own delightful drawing of Alex, and inside a letter to me. Karen included a letter with the folders, explaining to me that she had become an African Grey owner after seeing the PBS film Parrots: Look Who’s Talking about a decade ago. “Whenever I teach the children the bird section of my vertebrate course, I show them the PBS video and pictures of my own bird,” she explained. “I happened to be doing this section when I read about Alex’s death, and I talked about it in class. They knew how much my Grey me
ans to me, and they understood how much Alex must have meant to you, Irene. We talked about what we could do, and the children decided they wanted to make sympathy cards.” Here are just a few of the messages they sent me:

  “I know Alex meant a lot to you,” one of them began. “Inside of you will be OK in time.”

  Another letter started, “I feel sorry that your friend Alex left you. But he’s in a better place now.”

  One was especially moving: “Alex must have meant a lot to you. He will always be with you. I lost my grandmother a few years ago. But deep down she is always with me. Just like Alex is always with you.” The sentiments of children’s innocent hearts touched ours so deeply, and moved us all to great tears.

  On September 28, just three weeks after Alex died, I flew to Wichita, Kansas, and checked into the Hyatt Regency. I was there for a fund-raiser for The Alex Foundation that had been arranged several months earlier. There was to be a small gathering, a cocktail party for me to meet special donors, and then a larger number of people at dinner, when I was due to give a talk. Everyone there would be parrot enthusiasts.

  I had given such talks dozens of times over the years, all over the country. I always presented Alex’s most recent accomplishments, filled in some background about his other abilities to give the larger picture of his achievements, and then entertained questions. These seminars were always lively, always positive, always inspiring. I was always at ease at such events, never needing to think too much about what I would say. It was all so much a part of who I was. When I had set out from Boston on this occasion, I thought I would do my usual thing, the easiest path to take. By the time I landed in Wichita, I wasn’t so sure. And when I turned in that night I knew it would be impossible, that I would have to do something different. After all, this was to be my first public talk since Alex passed away.

  At the cocktail party, people spoke kindly and sympathetically to me; it was the same over dinner. The setting was Hyatt elegance, the excellent food beautifully presented. When it came time for my talk, I stood, looked around at all the faces turned in my direction, and thought, What am I going to say? I had no notes, even though the talk I was about to give would be completely new, different from anything I had ever given. I had decided I would just wing it and see what happened. I began to talk about the thousands of e-mails and letters we’d received, giving some examples of the sentiments people expressed. I told them of former students who wrote to tell me how working with Alex had influenced their career and life choices, how much they admired my strength in the face of enormous difficulties, how I always overcame the odds. And I told the intimate gathering that day that I had never seen myself as a strong woman, ever.

  As I stood there talking, a kind of half-conscious sublimation occurred in the back of my mind, a growing crystallization of what the great outpouring of personal emotion and public recognition really meant. As this was happening, I could hear myself recounting people’s stories about how Alex had impacted their lives, helped them in painful times. I read to them Wren Grahame’s long e-mail about the miracle that was Alex and how this brought a miracle to her, and I spoke of how very moving it had been for me when I first read it. I spoke about the articles in the New York Times and other papers, the obituary in the Economist, the report in Nature, and all the other coverage that lauded Alex’s (and my) accomplishments over the years.

  It was an overwhelmingly emotional moment for me at the Hyatt that late September day. I didn’t actually cry, but tears were ever present; I had to pause more than once. I could see tears at every table. Through all this welled up inside me the realization that had been growing over the previous few weeks—that what Alex and I had done in our time together had achieved important things in the world and in people’s lives.

  This realization was important because, over the years, despite Alex’s accomplishments, he and I had faced a lot of denigration. You might think that an MIT-and Harvard-trained scientist working at various universities would be given a certain amount of deference, but as a woman working with a bird, I found it was sometimes the opposite. Some people argued that Alex was merely mimicking our voices, not thinking. Some said that my claims about animal minds were vacuous. This negativity had worn on me, had been like a weight on my self-confidence, my self-esteem. For thirty years I felt that I had been banging my head against a brick wall.

  And now that weight seemed to lift. Stories such as Wren Grahame’s and Deborah Younce’s, and many, many others like them, touched me most deeply and made clear the impact Alex and I had had on people’s lives. I had never been aware of it. I came to call this my Wonderful Life moment. In the 1946 film by that name, George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart), a small-time bank employee in middle America somewhere, was so depressed by what he saw as his unfulfilled life that he decided to commit suicide on Christmas Eve. Just as George is about to throw himself into an icy river, Clarence, an angel second class in need of earning his wings, stops him. Clarence takes George on flashbacks through his life, showing how his many small actions over the years had helped many, many people in ways in which George had been unaware. For me at that moment in Wichita, my Clarence was all the wonderful people and their messages, allowing me to see what had been there all along, invisible to me: Alex’s and my work together had not been in vain.

  That epiphany has allowed me to reconsider my own story, and Alex’s, from the beginning.

  Chapter 2

  Beginnings

  My connection with birds goes back a long way. Not long after my fourth birthday my dad gave me a baby parakeet, a budgie, as a surprise gift. He was a little bundle of green feathers topped by a small head that darted nervously this way and that. I watched as the poor little thing trembled with anxiety, stepping rapidly from foot to foot on his perch, chirping tentatively: peep, peep, peep. Then he cocked his head, looked at me, cocked his head the other way, looked at me some more, and chirped with a little more confidence: peep, peep, peep! I was transfixed. “Hello, birdie,” I said in my own tentative, four-year-old voice. I opened the cage door, offered my index finger, and he stepped on it. I lifted him up so we could see eye to eye and said, “Hello, little birdie. Who are you? What are we going to call you?”

  “Let’s call him Corkie,” my dad said. Corkie had been my father’s nickname as a kid, for what reason I never knew. “No,” I said. “He’s my bird, and I’m going to call him—”

  I have tried very hard to recall what I said, but the name that so readily came to me that day has eluded me for some time now. That little bundle of green was to become so important in my early life, yet I’ve blocked out his name. We’ll just have to call him No-Name for the purpose of telling my story. And that’s not completely inappropriate, because in truth, at that point in my young life I felt a little bit like a no-name entity myself. You see, I was an only child, and there were no other children in our Brooklyn neighborhood. All my parents’ friends lived quite far from us, and their children were a lot older than me. And my cousin Arlene, who was six months younger than me and therefore a potential friend, lived in Queens, a bit of a trek back then; visits were infrequent at best. So it was essentially just me.

  My mom was what in those days would have been called a “refrigerator” parent: cold and distant, she never hugged me spontaneously or spoke loving words to me, and she never played with me nor read to me. My dad taught elementary school during the day, studied thanks to the GI Bill for a master’s degree at night, and took care of his sick mother, so I didn’t see him from one “good morning” kiss to the next. Until the day that No-Name entered my life it had been just me, a loner with no one to talk to all day but myself. But now that had changed. Now it was no longer just me. Now it was No-Name and me. I was thrilled. I had a companion at last, someone to talk to, someone who appeared to be devoted to me.

  My parents’ Brooklyn house was on Utica Avenue, not far from Eastern Parkway. It was about as urban a setting as could be imagined. We lived in the second-floor apa
rtment of a two-story turn-of-the-century redbrick building that my dad had inherited from his father. The stairs that led up to our apartment looked to my young eyes to be precipitous and endless. The ground floor was a store that was rented to a succession of businesses, whoever could pay the rent. In back was a small guest house where my uncle Harold lived. I hardly ever saw him.

  Our apartment was quite large, with two bedrooms in the front overlooking the street: one was my parents’, while the other was a guest room, though no guest ever stayed there as far as I knew. A central living room was dominated by my father’s proudest possession, a Victrola phonograph, a monster piece of equipment, all shiny wooden veneer, speakers, and brass handles. I spent a lot of my time dancing by myself to Strauss waltzes I played on that Victrola, spinning and twirling, whirling and swooshing. How I got into such a pastime at that age, and what I was thinking as I danced, I do not remember. But I do remember the sense of freedom and joy of moving to the music.

  My room was at the back, overlooking the yard, such as it was. I especially liked the circus wallpaper: elephants, tents, and clowns. At the back also was my father’s “workroom,” where in the little spare time he had he sculpted clay figures, usually human heads. I loved to watch him as a nose, lips, and ears emerged from the lifeless clay as if by magic. A door from the workroom led onto a spacious, open porch edged by low cinder-block walls, plastered and whitewashed. In the summer I had one of those little inflatable kiddie pools out there, where I played by myself. And all around were flowers in boxes and pots, ablaze with color. My father spent hours tending to them in solitary absorption, as with his sculpting. When we later moved to a house, this absorption would turn to growing African violets in the basement in winter and to a wondrous real garden in summer.