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 continued doing number work with Alex, including a study on recognizing and understanding Arabic numerals. That was a long, challenging project that was to come to spectacular fruition years later. I was working on a simpler number concept one day in the fall of 1992 while Linda Schinke-Llano was visiting from Illinois. I was showing Alex a tray of objects of different materials and different colors. “How many green wool?” I asked Alex. We had been doing this task for a short while, and Alex up to that point had been performing as he would for a TV crew, that is, spot on.

  Alex eyed the tray and looked at me in a way he sometimes did, which I can describe only as wryly. “One,” he piped. The answer was “two.”

  “No, Alex. How many green wool?”

  That look again. “Four,” he said in his charming sing-song, double-syllable way: “Foo-wah.”

  Linda was watching, and I wanted her to see how well Alex was doing since his illness and rehab. “C’mon, Alex. How many green wool?”

  It was no use. He kept alternating: “One…four…one…four.”

  By now I had realized he was just messing with my head. I knew that he knew the correct answer. “OK, Alex,” I said sternly. “You are just going to have to take a time-out.” I took him to his room and closed the door.

  “Two…two…two…I’m sorry…come here!” Linda and I immediately heard coming from behind Alex’s closed door. “Two…come here…two.” Linda and I were laughing to the point of tears.

  “I guess Alex is fully himself again,” I finally was able to say to Linda. “The little rascal!”

  Early in May 1992, I received a letter from Howard Rosen, a lawyer in Los Angeles. He wondered if he could visit Alex and bring his girlfriend, Linda. I often received such requests, usually from parrot people who have heard a lot about Alex through the grapevine. Mostly I politely decline, partly for reasons of security in the lab, partly to ensure the parrots’ health, but also because my work schedule was extremely full. Howard’s letter began, “Dear Dr. Pepperberg: This letter isn’t coming from a nut case. Please don’t discount it.” That kind of statement is usually a sure indication that the letter is indeed from a nut case, and normally I would have discarded it.

  But Howard explained in his letter that he was planning to propose marriage to Linda. Could Alex be trained to pop the question to Linda on his behalf—a kind of parrot proxy proposal? I wrote back and explained that Alex’s language training didn’t work quite like that. But I was so touched by this man’s devotion to his girlfriend and by his inventiveness that I said, “Come anyway.”

  When Linda and Howard visited the lab very shortly thereafter, I heard the whole story. Linda was crazy about animals and had assiduously followed Alex’s story in magazines and on television. She had taped a TV show of Alex and me and had shown it to Howard. He surreptitiously took the tape so he could locate me. He had planned to take Linda for a long weekend in Tucson and then spring the Alex wedding proposal on her as a surprise.

  When Howard got my reply, he changed plans. He went out, bought a diamond ring and two plane tickets for Tucson, and made a booking at the Westwood Brook Resort, in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains, just above Tucson. On the afternoon of May 8, he had Linda sit down; he got on one knee, as is proper. He then proposed marriage, proffered the ring and the plane tickets at the same time, and explained about the planned visit to my lab. Linda was ecstatic, as any woman in love would be at such a moment, with a proposal of marriage being made to her. “I’m going to meet Alex,” she exclaimed. “That’s just wonderful!” Howard told me jokingly that he was just a little downcast that Linda’s response wasn’t “I’m going to be married. That’s just wonderful.” Such was Alex’s celebrity. Howard and Linda flew to Tucson that very same day.

  Alex wore his celebrity mantle with great ease and appeared to revel in the attention it brought him. Television crews from the United States and elsewhere came to the lab ever more frequently. Each time was another opportunity for Alex to show off, to flaunt his skills, to be the center of attention. He’d get a certain light in his eyes, metaphorically puff himself up, and step into the role of star of the moment. The public exposure earned us a good deal of notoriety. As so often happens in academic environments, it also stirred a bit of jealousy among my colleagues in the department, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

  Celebrity status was bestowed on Alex by adoring followers, too. Carol Samuelson-Woodson, an acquaintance, volunteered to help me take care of Alex over a Thanksgiving toward the end of my stint at Tucson. This was to be Carol’s first encounter with Alex. Carol wrote about her experience in some detail in a charming essay. She described going through the security door into the lab and stepping in the disinfectant trays to prevent infection. “I finally came to a large, cluttered room where three beautiful African Greys gave me that inscrutable once-over,” she wrote. “The closest bird played on a large, round table covered with what looked like the contents of an overturned wastebasket: piles of shredded paper and globs of corn, berries, mashed veggies—very colorful. The other two parrots were on the counter, separated from each other.”

  The student in charge of the lab that day was telling Carol about schedules, food preparation, and so on. Finally Carol, who admitted to being very nervous, got up the courage to ask, “Is…one of these birds…Alex?”

  The student said casually, “Oh, yeah, this is Alex,” pointing to the bird on the round table right in front of Carol.

  Carol wrote, “Stunned, I sank to my knees, rested my arm on the table to steady myself…I couldn’t believe that here, right before me, was the fabulous creature, feathers and all, and that I had started off by SNUBBING him. ‘THIS is ALEX?’ I mumbled stupidly. I guess I’d expected a red velvet carpet leading to a magnificent throne; a golden perch and an impossible haughty bird in purple cloak and bejeweled crown. Then His Cuteness stepped onto my hand and marched right up to my shoulder, and basked in my belated adulation.”

  Alex never did sport the accoutrements of nobility, avian or otherwise. But Carol was right about the haughty aspect of Alex. Not all the time, and not always impossibly, but he filled that role with great aplomb when he felt like it. Which was quite often.

  Ever since I started working with Alex in the mid-1970s, I had focused on his production and comprehension of labels and how he responded to requests or made his own—in other words, two-way communication between us—using parts of human speech. One of my first graduate students, Dianne Patterson, had a background in linguistics. This provided a wonderful opportunity to ask different kinds of questions about Alex’s vocalizations.

  I chose Alex as my partner in our long research project because I knew that Greys can produce English speech very clearly compared with other species of parrot. There are endless stories among Grey owners about the ability of their birds not only to speak clearly but also to sound almost identical to their owners. My friends Deborah and Michael Smith have a Grey, Charlie Parker. Charlie bonded strongly with Michael and speaks just like him, sometimes to Michael’s embarrassment, other times to his advantage. Here’s an example.

  Debbie told me of a time when she was on the phone to a particularly obnoxious insurance agent. “He was being especially rude and overbearing, very loud,” Debbie told me, “and I wasn’t handling the situation very well.” Charlie was getting more and more agitated by this verbal abuse, clinging to the side of his cage. “Charlie suddenly yelled out in Michael’s voice, ‘I’m going to kick your ass, you son of a bitch.’ The guy was stunned into silence. I said to him, ‘Well, I don’t think we have anything further to discuss.’ And that was the end of that ugly episode.”

  I don’t have any stories to match Debbie and Michael’s, but I am all too aware that Alex picked up the Boston accent that I acquired while living in the area, fairly mild though it is. When Alex said, “Want shower,” it came out, “Want shou-wah,” in the “charming” way Bostonians have of swallowing their r’s.

 
Obviously, my students and I have no problem understanding the sounds Alex makes. And our studies have shown that he has no problem understanding what we say to him. Dianne and I asked two questions. First, Alex’s vocalizations sound like English speech to our ears, but are they really like English in their acoustic properties? Philip Lieberman, an eminent linguist, suggested years ago that parrots produce human speech by a clever combination of whistles, not the way you and I make word sounds. As a result, the acoustic properties of human and parrot sounds should be very different. Our second question was, how does Alex make sounds that to our ears resemble words when his anatomy is so different from ours in his vocal tract, his tongue, his possession of a beak, and, of course, the absence of lips?

  To answer these questions, we used special equipment to record and analyze the sounds he made when answering our questions. And we installed him inside a heart X-ray machine so we could watch how his anatomical parts moved, or did not move, when he vocalized. I won’t go into any detail here, because linguistic analysis can sound pretty daunting, but will focus on just one thing. A fundamental acoustic component of human speech is a so-called formant, an energy pattern that is characteristic of each speech sound we make. When a linguist looks at a sonogram of someone talking, for instance, she would be able to recognize what parts of speech—“oh” or “ee” or “ah,” for example—are being produced. She would also identify the sounds as human.

  When Dianne and I looked at sonograms of Alex’s vocalizations, they looked, if not identical to what I would produce, then very, very similar, formants and all. Human speech, it turns out, is not as unique as it has long been held to be. Alex produces sounds that, acoustically, are very similar to the ones that you and I produce. No wonder we can understand each other, or at least hear what the other is saying. How exactly he does it is quite complicated and not really as interesting as the fact that he can. (Those of you who would like to know more will find what you need in chapter 16 of my book The Alex Studies.)

  Our most exciting discovery was the way in which Alex produces the sounds we recognize as labels. Take “corn” and “key,” for example. If Alex were simply mimicking these words, he would learn them and produce them as a complete sound. When you and I say “corn” and “key,” however, we break the words up, so that the “kuh” in “corn” is different from the “kuh” in “key,” and each word is completed with the appropriate sound, “orn” and “ey.” The fancy term for this behavior is “anticipatory co-articulation.” No animal was supposed to be able to do that. But, as Dianne and I demonstrated, Alex did that. Which means that such speech patterns are not as uniquely human as many people may think.

  This behavior is one of a number of building blocks of language abilities, and here we find it in Alex’s brain. Once again I need to stress that this does not mean that what Alex had was language, but that what he did makes us question a little more the nature of language and how it came to be what it is in you and me. On Alex’s part, he once again demonstrated abilities he was not supposed to have.

  Smart bird.

  By the spring of 1995 I realized that pursuing long-term work with Alo was not feasible. Reluctantly, I sent Alo to Salt Lake City, Utah, to live with my friend Debbie Schluter, who I knew would give the bird the needed nurturing. Now we had to find a replacement. Branson Ritchie, one of the country’s top avian veterinarians, told me that a friend of his, Terry Clyne, had offered to donate a Grey to my project.

  Terry was a lawyer in Georgia, but her passion and avocation was breeding Greys at the Apalachee River Aviary. We talked on the phone. She told me she had the perfect candidate, a thirteen-week-old bird that was fully fledged and fully weaned, ready to go. We agreed that I would fly down to pick up the bird the following week, as I was going to be in Washington, D.C., and a side trip would be easy. This was early June.

  I arrived at Terry’s beautiful spread in Farmington, south of Athens, and she immediately took me to the breeding facility. Soon I was sitting on the floor amid a small flock of young Greys. It was quite a sight—and sound! Despite the fact that Terry had picked out a bird for me, she put me on the floor with all the babies she had at the time. Immediately I heard a cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep as the smallest of the flock tumbled over itself to reach me, barely able to toddle coherently, more quills than feathers on its tiny body. It started to pull at my jeans, and cheeped some more. He could not have been cuter, this fuzzy little thing with a disproportionately big head, eyes, and beak. A tiny bundle of energy and enthusiasm, all directed at me. Terry looked at me and said, “Well, Irene, I think, er…”

  I nodded and said, “Yes, Terry, I think so, too.” The little seven-and-a-half-week-old had chosen me. I simply could not resist.

  After we stopped laughing and cooing, Terry asked me, “What do you know about hand-feeding Greys, Irene?”

  I had never had to do it much; Kyo had needed only a bit of supplementary feeding, and that with a spoon. “Nothing,” I said.

  “Then we need to teach you how, fast,” said Terry.

  Greys as young as this little critter have to be fed using a syringe. It is very tricky, and potentially lethal. If you squirt the baby formula into the trachea rather than the esophagus, the bird dies. I got a one-hour crash course in how not to kill my precious new Grey.

  “I want you to have this, too,” Terry said to me as I was leaving, carefully carrying my infant Grey in a cat carrier. She handed me a small cardboard box. I opened it and saw a pink glass box in which, cradled in cotton wool, were fragments of a white egg, about an inch big, from which my chick had hatched less than two months earlier.

  “Thank you, Terry,” I said, and slipped the box into my purse.

  When I got to the airport, I phoned Debbie in Salt Lake City and said, “Debbie, remember when you said I should call if there’s anything I ever needed? Well, I need you to fly to Tucson to meet me. Now.” I explained the unexpected situation to her. Debbie is a veterinary technician and skilled at feeding baby birds. We rendezvoused at the airport and then drove our little bundle across town to the lab, where Debbie spent several days teaching a team of us the skills, and hazards, of hand-feeding. There followed a nerve-wracking few months. Every day I lived in dread of the phone ringing in the morning before I left for the lab, bringing the news that something had gone terribly wrong. Thankfully, it never did.

  Raising this little bird was like no other bird experience I had ever had. All the parakeets I’d owned as a kid had been fledged and weaned when I got them. Alex had been a year old when I got him, and Alo and Kyo, though younger, were still fully grown in size, if not yet sexually mature. All three Greys had for the most part been able to take care of themselves, feeding and preening. Not only did we have to hand-feed our new charge several times a day, but we also had to carry him around with us most of the time, wrapped in small blankets, for many weeks. The air-conditioning made the lab too cold for a bird with few feathers. And he would cry in distress if left by himself. He had been used to being cuddled with flockmates for comfort, hearing their heartbeats, feeling their warmth. He needed to hear our heartbeats when we held him. He needed our warmth. I had to be a parent substitute to him, preening his feathers and popping his quills (removing the keratin sheath from new feathers), because he had no mom to do that for him.

  Inevitably, you bond in a very special way when you share these intimate times with a creature that is totally dependent on you. And so very cute. Alex would always own the number one spot in my heart—that went without saying. But this little newcomer nestled his way into there, too.

  What to call the new bird? We settled soon on Griffin, for several reasons. First, it was in recognition of Donald Griffin, who had helped establish animal thinking as a legitimate field of science in the 1970s and 1980s. He had also helped get research funds for me while I was at Purdue. Second, some of us thought that his exaggerated chickhood features made him look like a gryphon, the fierce creature of myth who was half lion, half eag
le. Last, Griffin and Sabine, a love story involving a parrot image, was a hot read in the lab that summer. So Griffin he became. (Because of the close, parent-substitute relationship I developed with Griffin, I ensured I would not take part in his training and would test him only in company with others. I felt I had to maintain that distance.)

  A short time after Griffin arrived, we decided we would introduce him to Alex. When confronted with a youngster, adult birds may develop a caring, parental response, becoming protective. Part of our plan for future work was to have Alex play the role of a trainer for Griffin, partnering with one of us in the model/rival program. A good relationship between the two birds would therefore be very helpful. I carried Griffin over to Alex’s table. Alex was busy working on his cardboard box, creating doors and other openings he could walk through, the way he would excavate a nest hole in the wild. I figured that introducing a new chick into this nestlike situation would be really easy.

  I put Griffin gently onto the table. Alex stopped what he was doing, looked at Griffin, immediately growled his don’t-mess-with-me signal, and began to walk slowly toward Griffin, feathers raised and beak poised menacingly. His intent was unmistakable. He was going for the jugular. I quickly snatched poor Griff out of harm’s way, thinking maybe we should have put Alex in Griffin’s spot in the lab instead of invading Alex’s “territory.” But it was now too late, and probably too dangerous, to try again. After the incident, Alex sat at the center of his table, the center of his domain, preening and wearing a rather self-satisfied look. We would just have to get along without a parental, caring Alex taking Griffin under his wing.