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

  I spent a lot of my time watching kids’ shows on television in the morning. Then I would draw, developing some little talent I inherited from my father. Or I’d fill in coloring books my aunt gave me. My mom and dad disapproved of spending money for such things—or maybe didn’t have any to spare—and instead my dad drew circles and other shapes on pieces of paper, so I could fill them in like Easter eggs. I was never given toys, mostly because my parents had never been given toys in their childhoods, and so it was something they didn’t even think about. Both my parents were first-generation Americans: my mom’s parents were Romanian, my dad’s Lithuanian, and both had experienced severe deprivation growing up. In any case, the toys didn’t matter to me. I was just as happy playing with pots and pans, taking the coffeepot apart and putting it back together. But buttons were my favorite.

  My mom had a huge button drawer. Her father had been in the rag trade, and so there was an endless supply of buttons of all kinds. I spent hours playing with them, sorting them into categories, some obvious, such as size, color, and shape, and some I made up. Sometimes I sat at the coffee table, meticulously organizing, carefully sorting. Other times I lay on the floor in my bedroom, buttons at eye level, seeing close up this ever-moving kaleidoscope of my own making, often seeming to develop a life of its own. Of course, I had to do all this game playing, whatever it was, without “making a mess,” as my mother constantly admonished me.

  When No-Name came into my life he fell right into my daily routine. He sat on my shoulder as I watched television or colored, and chirped a lot. But his favorite, like mine, was the button drawer. As I did my sorting routine, No-Name darted about from pile to pile, pushing buttons this way and that. It became quite a game to see if my attempts at imposing order could keep ahead of his high-energy disruptions.

  We also loved the typewriter game. My dad had a typewriter in his workroom, the manual kind with the carriage you flipped back to the beginning of the line by pushing a lever, which produced a cheerful bing when a hammer struck a bell. In the days before No-Name, I often spent what seemed like hours banging away at the keyboard, sweeping the carriage back—bing—over and over. Now, with No-Name as part of the game, it was much more fun. He sat on the carriage as I banged the keys, jerking unsteadily along with each hammer stroke. And he seemed to love it when I swept the carriage back and produced the bing. He chirped cheerily at that and hopped around happily.

  No-Name never learned words. He never spoke to me. He didn’t need to, as far as I was concerned. I talked to him endlessly, about anything and everything, and he would look at me intently and chirp enthusiastically right back. To a four-and-a-half-year-old who had yearned for companionship, ached for love, No-Name offered a lot. In her book Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver wrote, “Children robbed of love will dwell on magic.” For me back then, I could imagine no greater magic coming into my life than having the intimacy and love I felt with my little bundle of green feathers, No-Name.

  My mom was bitter about her life, with good reason. When she was first married she had a good job as a bookkeeper at a housing project, which she loved. She expected to go on to better things. Then she became pregnant with me, and it meant the end of her professional life. This was 1948, and mothers didn’t work back then. She had no choice but to give up her job, her hope of a fulfilling future gone. She bitterly resented it. Mom made it very clear to me—often explicitly—that I was the reason for her ruined life, her consignment to a permanent sentence of drudgery. She occupied her days obsessively washing, ironing, cleaning the apartment, cooking (even though she didn’t like to eat), and then cleaning all over again. Most days she would go to the local shops. I usually tagged along with her.

  Once, not long before No-Name came into my life, we went into the local bakery to buy freshly baked bread, a treat, because we usually had the homogenized white stuff. (I remember this incident because it was so painful and bewildering to me at the time. It is also iconic of my life back then.) The woman behind the counter in the shop picked up a cookie and offered it to me with a big smile. “Here,” she said to me, “would you like a cookie, little girl?” I was extremely shy with everyone, simply because I had had so little social interaction with anyone at all, especially strangers, and was completely socially inept, even for a four-year-old. Head bent, staring intently at the floor, probably hoping it would swallow me up and thus enable me to avoid having to deal with the situation, I stretched out my hand and took the cookie. Didn’t say a word.

  The woman must have been a little taken aback by my mute, gauche behavior. She said, “What do you say, little girl?” I had no idea what she was talking about, because my mom had not taught me what to say in these (or any) circumstances. Nothing about “please” and “thank you.” I guess Mom thought I would just pick it up. So I just stood there, head still bent in painful shyness, still not saying anything. “Well, you’ll just have to give it back, won’t you,” the woman said, probably teasing me. So I handed it back, desperately trying not to cry.

  My mom was mortified. She thought of herself as being “quite proper.” She made embarrassed excuses about my awkwardness and shyness, and pushed me through the doorway and into the street. Then she berated me all the way home for embarrassing her in front of the baker’s wife. I had no idea what she was talking about. All I knew was that I had behaved badly somehow, failed her somehow.

  Imagine taking this same untutored, socially inept loner of a kid—me—and thrusting her into the local school at the age of five. Imagine then that she is the only white child in the class. Kids made fun of me endlessly. I had funny hair. I had funny skin. It was traumatic enough to switch so abruptly from social isolation in my parents’ quiet apartment to immersion among thirty or so raucous kids in a small classroom. The taunting on top of that was torture. The kids weren’t being intentionally cruel, I’m sure, just kids being kids. But the effect was the same. Pretty soon I started getting sick a lot, all kinds of symptoms, missing school, obviously suffering from something. After the pediatrician could find nothing really wrong, my dad took me to a child psychologist, who essentially said, “The school is a toxic environment for her. Get her out of there.”

  Within six months we had moved from Brooklyn to Mentone Avenue in Laurelton, Queens, not far from my aunt (my mom’s sister), uncle, and my cousin Arlene. Their house was north of Merrick Road, ours was south, in a less favorable part of town where the houses abutted the Long Island Rail Road tracks. Our neighborhood was simple, squarish houses, separated by little driveways, with decent-sized yards in the back. They were built just after the war for returning servicemen. The effect was homogenous and nondescript but pleasantly leafy, certainly in comparison with our Brooklyn neighborhood.

  Our yard had a big mulberry tree in the back, which attracted birds all summer, and I thrilled to that, given my newfound love of birds. Dad put up a bird feeder so we could extend bird-watching throughout most of the year. The backyard faced those railroad tracks, and every time a train passed by, the house shook a little. I came to find the noise and the vibration a comfort, in the way that familiar elements in one’s environment can be. Arlene, by contrast, when she visited, was in constant fear that the train would roll right down into the yard and kill us all.

  The move was good for my dad because he could now really indulge his passion for flowers. He planted them profusely. The garden was his joy, his love. Nothing much changed for my mom, however, just different surroundings in which to mourn her lot. She and my dad were fighting (verbally) more and more, and I frequently retreated to the attic to escape their harsh words. I used to go there to read and do my artwork, too.

  My parents were dealing with their own demons, of course, but as a child I was unaware of them; all I felt were their consequences. When my mom was sixteen, her mother died, and the job of cooking and housekeeping for herself, her three siblings, and her father, fell to her. Her father did allow my mom to finish the last couple of months of high school before taking
on what must have been an enormous burden for a young girl. As an adult, she must have yearned to be taken care of, not to be thrust into caregiving once again. And her constant fearfulness—fear of anything new, fear of getting lost in the car when my dad was driving, fear of driving herself—were all probably rooted in the grinding uncertainty of her Depression-era childhood and then the terror of her new husband being in the war, with no word for months on end. She was attractive, very photogenic, always elegant when outside our home, always waiting for what would never be.

  As for my dad’s volcanic temper and obsessive need for control, I eventually came to understand it as part of the trauma of the war. He talked occasionally about the war to me, but only in the vaguest of terms, usually making light of it. If I tried to get more detail, he would either change the subject or make a joke, often about the ineptitude of his commanders, M*A*S*H-style. He obviously didn’t want to talk about the horrors. I learned only recently that he had been in the Battle of the Bulge, lived through scenes of horrendous carnage and weeks of deprivation, and been badly injured himself, physically but mostly psychologically. Silent struggles with the past, for both of them.

  My own struggles for companionship took a turn for the better in Queens. I owned a succession of parakeets following the death of No-Name, each of whom I still remember. There were Greeny and Bluey, several Charlie Birds, and more. Dime-store birds, they didn’t last very long, as no one understood proper diet and no one thought to take a sick bird that cost a few dollars to the veterinarian. Charlie Bird number one was the first real talker. Considering that I remember him and the others, it is all the odder to me that I cannot fill in the identity of No-Name.

  As far as human companionship was concerned, things improved only slowly. I was a thoroughgoing nerd, at one point complete with a pair of Coke-bottle-thick, blue-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses. I freely admit it, and I have school photos to prove it. I was even accelerated a couple of grades, so I was again rather socially inept, surrounded as I was by older kids.

  I had just two guests at my first birthday party in Queens—my cousin Arlene and the man who was painting the decorative disaster of a house we had moved into. I think people were initially wary about who would want to buy such a run-down mess, and so they steered clear of us. But before too long I began to make a few friends. I thus discovered that I wasn’t the inherent loner or social recluse I had grown up imagining myself to be. Not that I was much of a socialite, either.

  During the summer most of the kids in the neighborhood went to some form of camp. I stayed home, rode my bike around the neighborhood, and read endlessly, a passion I shared with my dad. (My cousin Arlene recently reminded me that we even read books at the dinner table when she visited.) It’s no surprise that when I eventually read Dr. Doolittle, I was completely enthralled. Here I was, talking back and forth with Charlie Bird number one. And here was this character who learned to talk to animals and understood what animals were saying. Dr. Doolittle is taught to converse with animals initially by an African Grey parrot named Polynesia. I daydreamed a lot about that, about being able to talk to and understand animals’ speech and thoughts.

  I had one close friend at high school, Doris Wiener, and a small group of other friends, mostly guys. Our connection principally was that we were all very studious. Most of the group were somewhat unfocused, but Doris and I were on a serious science track, the lone females in many of our classes. This was in the sixties, remember, so we were considered to be rather odd, and certainly not desirable as girls. We were also judged to be bright, so we were part of a group of fifty or so out of a graduating class of over a thousand who all took the same advanced classes.

  So in my final couple of years at high school I was a certified nerd and two years younger than many of my classmates; I was fourteen at the beginning of my junior year. The girls were mostly wearing the exaggerated makeup of the time and parading around in stylish clothes. I wore almost no makeup (a tiny smudge of light brown eyeliner at most) and had to make do with hand-me-down clothes. Despite all this, I did develop a certain confidence in who I was, partly through a flowering and nurturing of a passion for classical music (remember those Strauss waltzes) and the theater: we used to get highly discounted tickets to Broadway shows and Carnegie Hall as part of our advanced classes, and I loved every minute of those excursions. And I began to find out who I was intellectually. I was extremely analytical, and good at it.

  I began to realize this analytical part of me when I was first introduced to the periodic table of elements in chemistry class. Our task was to learn it, a giant memorization challenge, with ninety-plus elements arrayed in rows and columns. Then we were to learn how the elements reacted with one another. I was blessed with something of a photographic memory, so learning stuff was not a problem: it’s why I did so well at history and French, for instance. I started memorizing the information about the elements, and it quickly dawned on me that there were patterns and a pervasive order that made it all predictable.

  I discovered that once you knew how sodium reacts, for instance, you also knew how potassium reacts. Once you knew where any element was on the table, you pretty much knew how it would react with other elements. I adored it, the predictability of the patterns. It wasn’t about memorizing a bunch of garbage; it was about logic, and I was seduced by what I felt was its compelling beauty. I was very good at French, too, and won prizes for that. But I knew I was going to have to support myself at some point, and science seemed to offer better prospects than the humanities. Throughout much of high school I had assumed I would pursue some kind of career in the biological sciences. My dad definitely encouraged me in that direction because of his own interests; he had hoped to be a biochemist, but the Depression and World War II intervened. After the epiphany of the periodic table, I knew it would be chemistry, not biology. I was hooked.

  I was so hooked that I elected to be part of a group of twenty-four other students from high schools around Queens, almost all guys, to do a crash course of freshman college chemistry the summer before my senior year. It was a whole year’s worth of college chemistry in just a bit over six weeks of the summer break, instead of going to the beach or some other “normal” teenage summer activity. I thought it would be fun, but in fact the trek to Queens College, in Flushing, was wearing. And that paled in the face of the unrelenting intensity of the course itself.

  I did well enough in the course, but I can readily admit that it was absolutely horrible. What had I been thinking? There was one high point, however, toward the end of the six weeks. We were in lab class, and the lecturer was instructing us as to what we were supposed to be doing. He had a lab assistant who was all too obviously not happy to be there with us that summer. He was probably a graduate student just cursing his ill luck that he had to take care of these high school kids and keep them from killing themselves in the lab. The windows were open, because it was hot, and in flew a yellow parakeet, clearly distressed, flying back and forth among the lab benches. Bunsen burners were going, and there was all this dangerous lab equipment for the parakeet to negotiate. The lecturer was shrieking, “Get it out! Get it out!”

  I shouted, “No, no, it’s OK. I’ll get it.”

  I yelled for everyone to turn off their Bunsen burners, I put out a saucer of water in the corner of the room, and I asked everyone to be calm and quiet, so as not to freak out the bird any more than it already was. Very soon the bird landed on the saucer and started drinking vigorously. The poor thing was obviously very thirsty. I was able to catch it, and took it home. I planned to keep it, but Charlie Bird had other ideas. He started to fight with the unwelcome (to him) newcomer, and I realized I had to put an ad in the paper to try to locate its owner. The next day a girl called on the phone and said, crying, “I know this isn’t my bird, but I just lost my bird, and I am really sad. If nobody else wants this bird, I really want this bird.” I (and probably Charlie Bird) happily surrendered it to her.

  In whimsical moments, I l
ook back at this little story and think that it was as if the universe were trying to remind me of where my heart was: biology, and particularly birds, not chemistry. But my mind was set. The only question was, where to go to college?

  I aimed high, and why not? I graduated third in a class of sixteen hundred students, and I was only sixteen. I initially considered Cornell, a very good Ivy League school, because other girls had gone there from my school, as had a cousin. But two things happened. First, my parents learned that I could apply to the Ag School, the state-supported land-grant part, and insisted that I do so; it would save them lots of money but make majoring in chemistry rather difficult. Second, I discovered that the town was essentially fourteen bars and two movie theaters. I nixed that option. I am being a little facetious here, of course, but I definitely wanted to be in a town with a strong arts presence. I visited Boston and immediately fell in love with the city, because it had all the theater and music I could possibly need. The obvious choice was Radcliffe, which meant I’d study at Harvard, which had a very good chemistry department. When I told my college counselor of my choice, he said, “Why not try for Vassar?”

  My response was, “Vassar, that’s a girls’ school. Why would I want to go there? I’m a chemistry major.”

  Then he surprised me and said, “OK, so why don’t you apply to MIT?”

  I was shocked. “What? Girls don’t go to MIT.”

  “Yes, they do,” he said. “A couple of them, anyway.” One of them was from my high school and was now in graduate school. She was going to be visiting over the holidays, so he arranged for us to meet.

  “Yeah, there are some girls there,” she told me. “MIT is actually trying to increase the number of female students. Yeah, there’s, like, twenty, thirty girls each year.” I figured, hey, it was right next to Boston, why not give it a try?