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

  Radcliffe put me on a wait list. MIT accepted me, so, five months after my sixteenth birthday, with much still to understand about how to conduct a social life, not to mention how to live away from home, I packed my bags and stepped into this daunting, machismo bastion of revered learning. Charlie Bird number two came with me, though not till my sophomore year, when I had a room to myself.

  Charlie Bird was my constant companion—and solace—in the high-pressure academic environment that was (and still is) MIT. Trying to cope with the onslaught of course work that is part of the accepted culture there is often likened to trying to drink from a fire hose. That, combined with the hypernerdiness that is also part of the culture, can make for a pretty lonely and miserable experience for a student, especially for a not very socially sophisticated girl. When I got back to my dorm room each evening, Charlie Bird always gave me a warm, chirrupy greeting that was very welcome relief after the grind of the day. He sat with me as I tackled the assigned reading each evening, preening his pretty green plumage, singing and talking. Our “conversation” was often my only non-work-related exchange of the whole day, at least for the early part of my four years there.

  One time, when I went to a teaching assistant to ask some follow-up questions from a meeting we’d had a week earlier, he said to me: “I know this is a very weird question, but after you left last week, there were all these little green feathers on the floor. What was that about?” Of course, they were Charlie Bird’s feathers that had got caught in the book as he preened and perched on the spine while I was reading and turning the pages. They had drifted onto the floor and in between the pages as the assistant and I leafed through the book. This is one of the few memories of my early years at MIT that always brings a smile to my face, even now.

  Money was always tight for me, not least because of the horrendous cost of tuition, housing, and books, despite an MIT scholarship and the little help my parents were able to give me. I tried to economize the last two years by living essentially on tomato juice, boiled eggs, instant coffee, and ice cream, the last from a small café on campus. The ice cream guy quickly realized what I was up to, and he started to give me extra scoops for free.

  The hardships and social awkwardness aside, I became ever more enthralled with chemistry, especially theoretical chemistry, and the pattern, order, and predictability of its equations. I also became enthralled with a man. David Pepperberg, a graduate student at MIT, was having trouble coming to grips with organic chemistry, then my forte, and I was having trouble with electricity and magnetism, his forte. So we tutored each other. Before very long we were going steady.

  At this point I imagined myself pursing a career in chemistry, probably as a university professor. This was still something of a disappointment to my dad because of his love of biology. But, he said, at least it was a real science. Graduate school was therefore an essential next step for me, and, as David had yet to finish his Ph.D. thesis, I didn’t want to go very far away from Cambridge. When I applied to Harvard to do theoretical chemistry, my friends told me, “You’re nuts to even think about it.” Harvard’s chemistry department had a world-class academic reputation. It also had a world-class reputation for being excessively male-oriented. Women were seldom seen there. (It also, I learned much later, had an excessively high suicide rate for academic departments of its kind, and having survived the grueling, pressure-cooker culture of the place, I am not surprised.)

  As it happened, the year I applied, 1969, was the first year the United States government refused to give men a military draft deferment for going to graduate school. The Vietnam war had initially boosted enrollments; now the draft suppressed them. The department was forced to take in many more women than its usual token one per class, because it needed teaching assistants. I was one of some half-dozen women in a class of fifteen. I very quickly got a clear view of how women were viewed in the masculine-oriented world of advanced chemistry.

  David and I became engaged soon after I started at Harvard, and I proudly wore an antique ring with a big diamond; it had belonged to David’s grandmother. Just before Easter, I went into the administration office for some formality to do with my course. “Oh, is that an engagement ring?” the woman behind the administrator’s desk asked me cheerily. I said it was, and stretched out my hand to show it to her proudly. She then said, “So, when are you leaving?”

  The holiday was coming up, so I said, “We’re leaving for Easter break a bit early, on Wednesday afternoon.”

  The woman looked bewildered, shook her head, and said, “No, no, no. I mean, you know, when are you withdrawing from the department?”

  “Why would I do that?” I said, having no idea what she was talking about.

  She pointed to my ring and said, “Because you’re engaged,” as if that were all the explanation needed. She obviously thought I, as a married woman, should stay home, keep house for my husband, and produce babies; at most, take the kind of undemanding job that she had, and certainly not occupy valuable space in her department, thus excluding a man from that rightful honor.

  I told her I had no intention of leaving, and walked out of the room. I wasn’t going to be forced to do what my mom had had to do years earlier.

  After David and I married, he moved into my tiny studio apartment on the middle floor of a three-story house on Hammond Street, just behind Harvard’s Divinity School, one of Cambridge’s cozier neighborhoods. Charlie Bird came, too. It was not an easy life, with David doing experiments that might run for thirty-six hours at a time, coming home at odd hours, and me taking difficult courses and trying to develop a research program.

  After a few years had passed, my once-burning love affair with theoretical chemistry began to cool. Part of the disillusionment was my changing perception of career prospects. I heard from women in my cohort who were doing nontheoretical studies and thus nearing graduation that they were facing strong anti-female bias in job recruiting. They were asked questions like “What kind of birth control are you using?” and “So, you’re married; when are you going to have children and leave?” This was the early seventies, and the feminist movement still had a long way to go.

  Also eroding my passion was the subject itself. I wanted to figure out how molecules might interact, how reactions might happen, based on an understanding of their fundamental properties. Instead, I was spending more and more of my time running programs on IBM mainframe computers, long, complicated calculations involving endless typing of punch cards and then more hours of finding the one stupid little typo that crashed the program. Computers were still primitive, and working with them was laborious and dull. I was ready for a change, but I didn’t quite realize it. I needed a push.

  A celebrated local pyromaniac provided the shove. During the night of November 8, 1973, he set fire to garages abutting each of five houses in Cambridge. Our Hammond Street house was the last on his list, so by that time the town’s fire teams were pretty stretched, and we had to wait for a truck from neighboring Somerville. The house was destroyed, and we escaped with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Luckily, David had turned in his thesis two weeks earlier, and Chet, our last parakeet, had passed away a week previously, a victim, we think, of carbon monoxide drifting up from the garage on the ground floor. We were now homeless and without possessions.

  Harvard took pity on me and waived tuition fees for a semester. John Dowling, David’s postdoctoral adviser, took us in at his house in Lincoln, about ten miles west of Cambridge; in return, I cooked dinners and we helped look after his two young sons. It was a traumatic, tumultuous time, dealing with the dislocation and loss. The following March, PBS debuted its NOVA television series, devoted to science and nature. In my previous life I would not have seen these programs, because we didn’t have much time to watch television. But because we were in John’s house, we sometimes did, particularly if a program was on that was somewhat educational and that the two boys might find interesting.

  Among the early programs we saw were r
eports on dolphins whistling and chimps signing under the tutelage of university researchers. A later one was on why birds sing. I still remember the visceral shock of these shows. They were a revelation. Humans communicating with animals, animals communicating with humans, and humans learning about how animals learned to communicate with each other—it seemed little short of a miracle to me.

  I had been vaguely aware of a woman called Jane Good-all who was studying chimps somewhere in Africa. I had also been vaguely aware that three European researchers—Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Nikolaas Tinbergen—had won the Nobel Prize the previous fall for their studies in some aspect of animal behavior, but I hadn’t absorbed what it was or why it was important. I had no idea that serious researchers were doing serious studies on how animals lived in their natural state and on what was going on in their minds. And I definitely was not aware that a man called Donald Griffin, who had made his name by discovering how bats navigate (with sonar), was leading a revolution in the way biologists were beginning to think about animal minds, about animal thinking. Remember, MIT wasn’t exactly the kind of place that dealt with such topics, and I had had no exposure to this type of research.

  But I did know—instantly and inescapably—that this was where my future lay. I had no idea what I would do nor how I would do it, but I recognized the moment as one of those rare “feelings” one sometimes gets in life that one just “knows” is right, that one just has to follow. Given my lack of exposure to whole-animal biology—high school classes were about the digestive system and such—it was not really surprising that, until that instant, I had given not a single, serious thought to studying animals as a career; I had not once lain awake at night thinking, Gee, I wish I was able to study human-animal communication rather than slogging on with chemistry that I am no longer enjoying. But here I was, prepared to throw aside years of university work, of deep commitment and effort to studying chemistry as a career path, and embark on a venture for which I had little knowledge and no training.

  Our host, John Dowling, was a professor in Harvard’s biology department, so he was in an excellent position to orient me. He essentially said to me: “Yes, studying animal behavior is real science, and we do some of that here at Harvard. If you are seriously interested in pursuing this, why don’t you go to the Museum of Comparative Zoology and talk to people there?” I did, and as a result of what I was told, I started attending courses and seminars in bird behavior, child cognition, and language. And I read voraciously: anything and everything I needed to equip me for where I wanted to go. I continued to put in the hours necessary to finish my doctorate in chemistry, but I had a new calling.

  I learned about the pioneering work on human-chimp communication by people such as Allen and Beatrice Gardner, David Premack, and Duane Rumbaugh. I heard Peter Marler talk about his discoveries on how birds learn their songs. I was enraptured by this whole new area of science: new, definitely, to me, but new also to science itself, inasmuch as these people were breaking new ground. It was hallowed ground. They were talking about teaching nonhuman animals the rudiments of human language and probing the extent of animal thinking and communication. Received scientific wisdom at the time insisted that animals were little more than robotic automatons, mindlessly responding to stimuli in their environment. The newly emerging science was overturning that view completely. It was nothing less than a revolution. And I wanted to be part of it.

  My only question was, “What animal should I study?”

  The answer was obvious. Birds learn their songs, and I knew from my own experience with my parakeets that they can learn words (some of them, anyway). Others were working on human-animal communication using chimpanzees. No one was working with birds. I knew birds are smart, and I was confident they could do this.

  Besides, from a practical point of view, working with birds is a lot easier than working with chimpanzees. I needed a species that could learn speech, which meant either parrots and related species or corvids (crows, ravens, and such). It didn’t take much time to discover that parrots are better talkers than crows and their relatives, and that the species that learned most easily and was the clearest talker was the African Grey parrot. A Grey it would be.

  Greys are now one of the most popular of bird pets. Indeed, parrots have a long history as pets, going back four thousand years. Egyptian hieroglyphics show images of pet parrots, and noble Greek and Roman families kept Greys, too. So did Henry VIII of England. And, of course, for a long time they were popular with Portuguese sailors, vocal companions on long voyages. They also happen to be exceedingly beautiful creatures, with delicate gray and white plumage, a white area around the eye, and a bright crimson tail. I also learned that Greys love attention and form deep and lasting bonds, with their owners becoming profoundly emotional about their birds.

  I determined that this would not be true of my Grey and me, however: I chose the species as a study animal because they had been shown to be very smart; I wasn’t choosing a pet. A German zoologist, Otto Koehler, had done groundbreaking work in the 1950s, showing that Greys have an unusual facility with numbers, and one of Koehler’s assistants, Dietmar Todt, had shown that Greys readily learn speech through social interaction. Aside from that, not much else was known about them in the realm of science. But that was enough for me.

  I finished my theoretical chemistry doctorate in May 1976, and David accepted a post in the biological sciences department at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, beginning January 1, 1977. I hoped to find a way of starting my own avian research there. In June 1977, we drove to Noah’s Ark, a pet store near O’Hare Airport in Chicago, to pick out my own Grey parrot. I had been in touch with the bird department director of Noah’s Ark several times in the previous few months, and I knew that he had about eight birds that had been bred in captivity.

  The place was huge, a cacophony of all kinds of potential pets and prospective owners. The bird director greeted us and showed us where the Greys were, a big cage with eight birds, all about a year old. “Which one would you like?” he said, looking at me.

  I shrugged, because I didn’t know how to choose. In any case, I reasoned that because I was embarking on a scientific study that should reflect the cognitive abilities of Greys in general, I thought it best to have one chosen at random. “Why don’t you select one for me?” I said.

  “OK,” he replied, and picked up a net, opened the cage door, and scooped up the most convenient bird he could reach. He flipped the bird on its back on a table, clipped its wings, claws, and beak, and popped it into a small box. Very unceremonious.

  The ride back to Lafayette was three and a half hours. It must have been hard for the little creature confined in the dark, having just been plucked away from the flock he had been with for at least half a year. I carried the traveling box to the lab space I had borrowed in the biological sciences department, and placed it on a table next to a proper parrot cage I had positioned in the corner of the room, so as to give him the best sense of security I could provide. David put on some heavy gloves, opened the box, picked up the struggling bird, and eventually managed to put him in the cage. (I always had David do the things that might traumatize the bird, because I needed to establish a sense of trust with it.)

  Right at that moment, the bird obviously didn’t trust anything or anyone, least of all me. He was trembling, squawking nervously, and stepping from foot to foot on his perch. The poor creature was obviously in a state of shock. He was also clearly scared of a parakeet, Merlin, in a cage at the other side of the room. Merlin was just as clearly scared of him.

  My Grey hardly looked the part at that moment, trembling and insignificant looking as he was, but here was the bird I hoped—and expected—would come to change the way people would think about the minds of creatures other than ourselves. Here was the bird that was going to change my life forever. I couldn’t help thinking back to No-Name, the parakeet who had transformed my life twenty-four years earlier. He had weighed barely an
ounce and measured just a couple of inches long. My newly acquired Grey was much bigger, almost a pound in weight, and ten inches tall. But my Grey was just as nervous, just as fearful, as No-Name had been all that time ago.

  This time, however, my new bird had a name. He was Alex.

  Chapter 3

  Alex’s First Labels

  I’m not sure who was more nervous in our first days together, Alex or me. I know I was a little on edge, and he sure looked it, the poor traumatized bird. He’d been snatched from what had been his home for many months and thrust into a completely new environment, a small, fairly bare room occupied by a scary parakeet and unfamiliar humans. I considered myself a bird person, but I’d never had such a big bird before, and I was more than a little unsure about how best to handle him. I knew what food and drink to give him. I knew I needed to talk softly and soothingly to him at first, and give him treats. I understood that I had to build his trust in me.

  It didn’t start well. Alex was still uneasy on the second day, still scared of the parakeet. I decided to move Merlin’s cage to another room. I then went back to Alex and tried to encourage him to perch on my arm. He wouldn’t even come out of the cage, despite my gentle verbal entreaties. The phone in the adjacent room rang; I went to answer it. By the time I returned to the lab, a minute at most, Alex had climbed out of his cage. Yes! Progress. I offered him some fruit, which he fussed with but didn’t eat. I held out my arm for him to perch, and he clumsily climbed onto it. I imagined he had never perched on someone’s arm before. More progress.

  Not for long. Clearly still alarmed, Alex tried to fly, and promptly crashed to the floor because his wings had been clipped back at the pet store. He was squawking pathetically, flapping his wings wildly. Suddenly there was blood everywhere, spraying this way and that. He had broken a new wing feather. Poor Alex was freaking out, and so was I, but I tried to appear calm so as not to upset him any more than he was already. Having dealt with broken feathers with my parakeets, I knew what to do. But I was facing a very frightened and significantly larger bird here, not a comfortably established pet parakeet. That made it much harder, more hazardous. I eventually managed to gather him up, remove the feather, and get him back into his cage. He was obviously badly shaken. “Alex does not come out more that day, scared of me,” I wrote in the journal I started when Alex arrived. Who could blame him?