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

  Not too long before we left Chicago, Alex gave me a terrible scare. In early September 1990, I returned from a short trip and found a message from a student on my answering machine. “I had to take Alex to the vet today, because he was wheezing badly,” it said. “Call the vet immediately.” I did, right away.

  “Susan, what’s wrong?” Susan Brown was one of three partners in the vet practice in a western suburb of Chicago that I routinely used.

  “It’s another one of these cases,” she said. “Aspergillosis.” Aspergillosis is a fungal infection that can affect the chest cavity and the lungs. Alex probably caught it from contaminated corncob bedding placed at the bottom of his cage in my absence when the usual pine shavings weren’t available. Several cases had turned up at local vet practices in the previous few weeks. “Look, it’s not bad,” Susan said, trying to calm me. “He’ll survive. I’m at the movies. I’ll call you when I get out.” Susan had one of the first cell phones. It looked like a brick and weighed as much as one.

  I went straight to my bird medical book, looked up aspergillosis, and froze. “Make your bird comfortable and wait for death” was the essential message. I was now panicked, and could barely contain myself until Susan called. She again reassured me, saying that the book was out of date and that Alex was going to be OK. “Trust me,” she said. “I’ll give you some meds for him. Come get them tomorrow.”

  I medicated Alex for about a week in the lab, but he was getting no better. I talked with Susan every day. Eventually she told me to bring him in so they could try some new drugs. Apparently, the outlook wasn’t as rosy as Susan had implied, because treatment for aspergillus infection in Greys at that time was not well developed. The one vet who specialized in the disease had developed drug regimes for raptors: eagles and other birds that weighed twelve times as much as Alex. Susan told me that she and her colleagues would have to experiment with the drug dosage, so Alex would have to stay in the hospital for a while.

  When I was getting ready to leave, I said, “Goodbye, Alex.” He looked at me, obviously feeling lousy and frightened, sitting in a small veterinary cage. “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice. “Come here. Wanna go back.” He sounded so pathetic, it really tore me up. “It’s OK, Alex,” I said as reassuringly as possible. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll be back tomorrow.” I had been saying that to him for a while, but this time it really meant something. It was important for him to understand that I was going to come back and that I wasn’t just going to leave him there.

  Each day I got up early, went to Northwestern, taught my class, and then drove an hour to the vets’ office, to spend as much time as I could with Alex. I’d leave by three o’clock to avoid the rush-hour traffic, return to the office and lab, pack for the upcoming move to Tucson, and eat a sandwich or such for dinner. It was very wearing, physically and emotionally.

  The vets administered some of the drugs by putting Alex in a nebulizer, essentially a tank into which they would vaporize the drugs, so he would breathe them in. The poor bird hated the process and at first kept saying, “Wanna go back…wanna go back.” Each time he had to wait until a timer went off, signaling the end of the session. He soon learned the routine, waiting until the bell rang before demanding, “Come here. Wanna go back!”

  On one occasion there was an emergency at the office, and the vets couldn’t get to Alex immediately after the timer went off. “Wait a minute, we’re busy,” they called to him. Alex couldn’t wait. After a couple of futile “Wanna go back” demands, he started to rap his beak on the glass wall of the nebulizer. “Pay attention!” he said. “Pay attention. Come here. Wanna go back!” He had picked up the phrase from students who, during training, would say to him, “Come on, Alex, pay attention!”

  By early November, it was obvious that the meds weren’t working. Susan and her colleagues, Richard Nye and Scott McDonald, called me in for a conference on how to proceed. One option was to continue with the drug regime and hope it would eventually work. Another was surgery. But that was experimental and could be dangerous. Finally I said I wanted to try surgery.

  At that time, there were only two veterinarians in the country who could do the microsurgery we needed. It involved scraping fungal spores out of Alex’s chest cavity. One was Greg Harrison, in Lake Worth, Florida, whom I had met at a conference. Fortunately, I had gone through all the red tape necessary to have a bird fly with me in a plane cabin, for the trip to Tucson. All I had to do now was get the tickets. I cancelled a talk I had scheduled with the Northern Illinois Parrot Society; unbeknownst to me at the time, they held a fund-raiser instead, to help out with the cost of Alex’s treatment. I put my own ticket on a Visa card. I called Ernie Colazzi, a friend who had once said to me, “If there’s anything you need, anytime, just call,” and explained I needed $600 for a plane ticket for Alex. He was too sick to go in a carrying case underneath my seat. I had to monitor him the whole time, giving him water and food.

  My dad, who lived in Florida at the time, met us at the airport and drove us to Greg’s office. We had to wait quite a while, and we couldn’t feed Alex because of the impending surgery. Alex was getting hungry. We sat in the waiting room, with Alex more and more urgently saying, “Want banana,” “Want corn,” “Want water.” I told him he couldn’t, that he’d have to wait. Alex looked at my dad and said, “Wanna go shoulder.” So Alex moved onto my dad’s shoulder, cuddling up to his head, mumbling that he wanted this or that in a soft voice. My dad was a little deaf, so he didn’t hear Alex’s quiet entreaties. Finally, Alex screamed into my dad’s ear, “Want kiwi!” Alex didn’t even like kiwi, but he was obviously getting desperate. As tired and upset as I was, I couldn’t help laughing.

  I asked to be with Alex when Greg gave the anesthetic, so that Alex would be calmer and not require so much of the drug. I went back to the waiting room and fell instantly asleep—the first time in weeks, it felt like. An hour or so later Greg woke me and handed me a little bundle. It was Alex, wrapped in a towel. “He’s going to be fine,” Greg assured me. After a short while, Alex began to stir a little, and then some more. He opened an eye, blinked, and said in a tremulous voice, “Wanna go back.” I said, “You’ll be fine. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  I picked up a much chirpier, cheerier parrot the next morning, and we went back to Chicago. Alex had to stay at the vets’ clinic for another couple of weeks for observation and to build his strength. We were also afraid that we couldn’t entirely disinfect the lab of aspergillus before we left for Tucson, and we didn’t want to risk exposing him again.

  Alex became quite a fixture at the vets’, talking to everyone who had time to stop and listen. His cage was right next to the accountant’s desk. The night before I was due to take him to Tucson, the accountant had to stay late, working on the books. “You want a nut?” Alex asked her.

  “No, Alex.”

  He persisted. “You want corn?”

  “No, thank you, Alex, I don’t want corn.”

  This went on for a little while, and the accountant did her best to ignore him. Finally, Alex apparently became exasperated and said in a petulant voice, “Well, what do you want?” The accountant cracked up laughing, and gave Alex the attention he was demanding.

  That’s my Alex.

  Chapter 6

  Alex and Friends

  Had things turned out differently, I would have contentedly stayed at Northwestern. I loved the gorgeous campus on Lake Michigan. I had some wonderful colleagues and close friends. The students there were terrific. And Alex was pushing the idea of what a bird brain was capable of achieving into territories no one had ever imagined possible.

  But my wishes didn’t matter. The academic authorities simply didn’t know what to do with me. I was way outside the comfort zone of mainstream science, too edgy in the questions I was asking, impossible to slot into neat categories: neither psychology nor linguistics, neither anthropology nor animal behavior. I was part of all of these things but couldn’t be shoehorned into a
ny single one. So when I had been on campus for six-plus years, tenure not even a remote prospect, I had to leave. It was a rule, and they did know how to follow rules.

  My marriage by this point had come to an impasse. It had been a very loving relationship to begin with, as marriages usually are. But David couldn’t grasp the importance of what I was doing and why my work, often unsupported and challenged, should occupy as much of my time as his career occupied of his. I simply couldn’t play a subordinate role. It was obviously best that we part.

  So on the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 1990, Alex and I arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, ready to check in at the United Airlines desk for a flight to Tucson, Arizona. I handed the agent two tickets. She was all smiles. She looked at them, looked around, and asked, “Where is Alex Pepperberg?” That was how Alex had been ticketed. I lifted the carrier so she could see Alex. He gave a cheery whistle. The agent instantly stopped smiling. “A parrot!” she blurted out. “Alex Pepperberg is a parrot?” she continued, putting a decidedly disparaging emphasis on the word “parrot.” “I’m sorry, we don’t sell tickets to pets,” she said with great indignation.

  “Actually, you do,” I replied. “Here’s the documentation.” I showed her the sheaf of papers, pages and pages of it, that I had worked on with United’s bureaucracy long before the trip: it confirmed that Alex was a valuable scientific resource (and somewhat of a TV celebrity) and thus needed a regular seat. It also certified that he was free of disease and could travel in the main cabin.

  The agent would have none of it. She refused to listen to anything I said. I asked for a supervisor to intervene in what was rapidly developing into something of a Monty Python sketch. The supervisor saw that Alex did indeed have a legitimate ticket for a seat of his own. The agent, now chilly as a winter wind off Lake Michigan, begrudgingly checked us in. “What’s that?” she then snapped, staring suspiciously at the three boxes I had at my feet.

  “That’s Alex’s luggage,” I said, by now highly amused at the unfolding farce. The boxes contained Alex’s equipment, which I had carefully sterilized to make sure we weren’t bringing any aspergillus with us. “I believe he’s allowed three items, one to carry on, two to check,” I said. “Isn’t that right?”

  The agent barely kept her anger under control. She tried for one last dig at me. “And I suppose you ordered him a meal?” she said with heavy sarcasm.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I did,” I said with a winsome smile. “He’s getting the fruit plate.”

  When the fruit plate arrived, Alex turned his beak up at it. He wanted my shrimp salad instead. The little guy knew how to travel!

  It was with mixed feelings that Alex and I arrived in Tucson to begin the next chapter of our journey together. Yes, I finally had a tenure-track faculty appointment, an associate professorship in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology: the first “real job” of my unusual career, the first shot at security that tenure confers. As a woman, now on my own, that was important. But half the department faculty had opposed my appointment and had petitioned the dean to block it. Department heads at the University of Arizona have absolute power, and EEB’s head, Conrad Istock, valued my work and believed my expertise would strengthen the department. The petition failed, and I was appointed. I had other supporters in the department beside Conrad, wonderful people, but the not-so-hidden antagonism made for an unsettling start.

  Before very long I put that negativism out of my mind as I began to absorb Arizona’s magic. I once wrote somewhere that Tucson brought tears to my eyes—literally, as I fairly quickly developed allergies to practically everything that grows there, but metaphorically, too, because of its beauty, majestic in its mountains, deserts, and giant saguaro cacti, and in its details, the animals, the smaller plants, and the birds. Oh, the birds! I had been an amateur birder ever since my dad put up the feeder in our yard in Queens. I became more serious as time went on. Now I had a birder’s paradise on my doorstep, quite literally.

  I bought a house about eight miles west of the city, an area that at the time was almost rural. Every morning I’d sit on my patio with a cup of coffee and gaze as the sun came up over the Rincon Range to the east. I watched as the sun’s rays streaked across the highest peaks of the Santa Catalina Mountains directly in front of me, and sighed at the beauty of the lilac-pink haze that grew in extent and intensity over the Tucson Mountains to the west. That is the entire sweep of the Santa Cruz Basin, in which the city of Tucson nestles. And there it was for me to drink in its beauty every day. How could I not be entranced? How could I not be seduced by Mother Nature’s splendor?

  For the first time in my life I felt deeply connected to nature, the rich diversity of the Sonoran Desert fauna and flora right there in my own acre and a half for me to look at, smell, and touch. And in a part of the country where the Native American presence is so palpable, I was very much aware of that people’s profound sense of oneness with nature. I resonated with that. All in all, I began to see Tucson as offering Alex and me great promise in our future work together, and as an opportunity for me for the first time to be my own self, not having to be something for someone else—a place and a time to restore my soul.

  After a spell in temporary quarters, I established my lab in the basement of the Life Sciences West Building. Compared with everything I’d had before, this space was huge. There was a large central area, dominated by a round table that was Alex’s domain (he also still had his ratty folding metal chair); there were two rectangular counters converging in one corner, one occupied by Alo, the other by Kyaaro, two young Greys I’d obtained from a breeder friend in southern California early in 1991 so I could expand our studies. (People had been constantly nagging me with comments like “But Alex is only one bird” and “What if Alex were to die?” The aspergillosis scare had made me pay attention to that latter possibility.) Each bird had his or her own room for sleeping, training, and testing. We had space for graduate students. And I had a huge office, truly palatial.

  Before long I had four graduate students, which allowed me to expand the scope of study, adding behavioral ecology fieldwork in Africa to lab training and testing. I had an army of some twenty undergraduate students, who maintained the lab and entertained and trained the birds. To an outsider it must have seemed chaotic, and in a way it was. My philosophy was to have a culture that balanced playfulness and fun with serious, careful scientific study.

  It was also very demanding, both on my time and financially. The department provided funds for one graduate student and National Science Foundation grant funds for another and for a few of the undergraduates. A bit more came from an undergraduate biological research program. But the rest came from The Alex Foundation, a nonprofit organization I established in 1991 to raise money to support all this work and for getting word of our discoveries to a wider audience. We ran fund-raisers and sold T-shirts and other Alex-related items, and I gave talks to bird societies. With all this activity and my new teaching responsibilities, I found myself working harder and longer hours than ever before. I never got back to my emotional oasis on the edge of the desert before ten-thirty each night and was rarely home on weekends.

  Both Alo and Kyo, as we usually called Kyaaro, were sweet birds, but they came with baggage unknown to us or my breeder friend, Madonna LaPell. Alo had been mishandled by an owner before being sent back to Madonna. Alo seemed fine when I got her, at the age of seven months. She bonded with the students who worked with her, and we made reasonable progress. But when her caregiver students started to graduate and leave the lab, the trauma of her chickhood abuse kicked in. She must have felt abandoned, and began to screech pitifully when new people came near her.

  Kyo, in contrast, appeared fine. True, he played really hard with his toys and had a shorter attention span than Alex had had when young, but then Kyo was only three months old. I didn’t know what was normal. When he reached sexual maturity we realized that he had an avian version of attention deficit hyperactivity diso
rder, ADHD. He became harder to work with and would be startled by every small sound in the lab, running under a desk if someone were to drop a book or even a spoon. He couldn’t seem to separate what was important in his environment from what was not.

  Before these various problems began to manifest, however, we were able to embark on what was to be a long-term study of training methods. We wanted to know whether the model/rival method, which always involved two trainers and was time-consuming, was completely necessary. Could birds learn labels as efficiently with more streamlined approaches, ones that demanded fewer trainers and therefore less social interaction? We used audio and video tapes as exemplars, for example. The answer became very clear: the model/rival technique was more effective by far than anything else we tried. My early gut instinct and common sense had been supported: a rich social context is essential to teaching communication skills. I was tempted to say, Duh!

  Alex, meanwhile, took quite a long time to fully recover from his near-death encounter from aspergillosis. One couldn’t tell simply by looking at him, his behavior and comportment, but he was not fully healthy for at least a year after we got to Tucson. Greys, like most parrots, hide symptoms of disability, because in the wild, displays of vulnerability cause an individual to be shunned, as they are likely to attract predators.

  For much of his time, Alex worked at being the boss of the lab, greeting visitors and directing activities from his round table near the middle of the room. We should have called him “Sir Alex,” and some students began to call him “Mr. A.” He liked to butt into Alo and Kyo’s training sessions when he could. They usually were in their rooms during these periods, but on occasion we’d do a bit of review in the main room; then Alex would shout out a correct answer to a question while Alo or Kyo was struggling. Or he’d admonish them, “You’re wrong,” when, as too often was the case, they were.