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

  Territoriality is natural in Greys, especially in dominant birds, as Alex unquestionably was. Neither Alo nor Kyo was welcome on Alex’s table, for instance; otherwise beak wrestling would break out if one of us didn’t intervene in time. Also not welcome, it turned out, was a toy that looked and sounded like a Grey. In the mid-1990s there was a brief fad for toys that would repeat the last few words or sounds you made to them. A graduate student brought a stuffed-parrot version of one of these toys into the lab. She put it on Alex’s table, and he adopted exactly the same stance he’d taken with poor Griffin. He approached the toy slowly, head thrust forward, beak out, producing that characteristic growling sound. Of course, the toy just growled right back. That infuriated Alex even more, and he seemed ready to tear the toy to pieces. It was removed to safety, and it never showed its beak in the lab again.

  Not all toy birds provoked this aggression, it turned out. Some must trigger a primal response, while others do not. After a local television program had featured Alex, someone sent him a toy parrot, one that played songs when you pushed a button. We suspended it over one side of Alex’s table, and he completely ignored it.

  After about a week, one day he looked intently at the suspended parrot, walked up to it, and said, “You tickle.” He then bent his head over toward the toy, the way he would to a student, who would then dutifully tickle Alex’s neck. Nothing happened, of course. After a few seconds he looked up at the toy, said, “You turkey,” and stalked off in a huff. The students had sometimes said, “You turkey” to Alex when he did dumb things. He had apparently learned how to use that stinging epithet without any training.

  Bernd Heinrich was a professor of zoology at the University of Vermont, now retired. One of his passions is crows and ravens. Heinrich and I share the same curiosity about bird intelligence. One day in late 1990 he decided to test the widespread belief that ravens are especially smart. Heinrich tied a piece of meat to the end of a piece of string some thirty inches long. He attached the other end to a horizontal branch of a tree in his home aviary and sat back to see if the ravens could figure out how to get access to the meat. (It was dried, so they couldn’t just break off a piece and fly away.)

  After a while, one of the ravens landed on the branch next to the string, leaned down, took the string in its beak, hoisted it up, and anchored the resulting loop between one of its claws and the branch. The bird did that half a dozen times, until it had brought the suspended meat within reach. It looked to Heinrich as if the bird had assessed the situation, worked out a plan for retrieving the meat, and put it into action. No trial and error, no practicing. The bird never attempted to fly off with its prize, even when Heinrich shooed it away. Apparently it understood that the meat was securely tethered.

  This seemed to me to be an elegant exercise, and I have to admit to a little edge of competitiveness on the bird brain front: if Heinrich’s ravens are smart enough to do it, what about my Grey parrots? Shortly after Heinrich’s paper came out, in 1995, I set up a similar challenge in the lab. I used a favorite bell rather than meat, given a Grey’s taste. I put Kyo on the perch; he looked down at the suspended bell, and then did exactly what the raven had done, using beak and claw to gradually haul up the bell. Score one for Greys.

  Then it was Alex’s turn. For him, I used an almond, something he liked more than any toy. I put him on the perch. He looked down at the nut and looked at me. He did nothing. I was wondering what he was thinking. After a few seconds he said, “Pick up nut.”

  I was a bit taken aback. I said, “No, Alex, you pick up nut.”

  He looked right back at me and said, “Pick up nut!” a little more insistently this time.

  I tried to encourage him several more times, but he simply refused. With one bird doing the task as planned but Alex refusing, we didn’t try to publish the results, and it was only several years later, with Griffin repeating Alex’s actions and yet another new, not-yet-really-talking bird repeating Kyo’s actions, that I realized what was happening.

  Once Alex had learned how to label objects and request things, he relished the control it gave him over his environment, the ability to manipulate the people around him. Alex’s boss-of-the-lab personality had emerged during our years at Northwestern. By the time we had settled in at Tucson, it was in full bore. The students used to joke that they were “Alex’s slaves,” because he would have them running around, attending to his constant demands. He was merciless with new students. He would run through his entire repertoire of labels and requests: “Want corn …want nut…wanna go shoulder…wanna go gym,” and on and on. It was Alex’s initiation rite for newcomers. The poor student would have to run around and fulfill all these wishes, otherwise he or she would never get anywhere working with Alex.

  Alex’s “failure” on the string-pulling test was not a black mark on his intelligence, I realized. It was a measure of his sense of entitlement, his expectation that I would do as he asked. If I were going to do something as silly as hanging a nut on a piece of string rather than handing it directly to him, as was usual, then I would have to give it to him when he asked for it. Otherwise he would have none of this game. Why had Kyo succeeded where Alex had not? Probably because at the time of the experiment, Kyo had little command of labels and requesting, and was thus much less used to getting people to do things for him. He relied on his native Grey intelligence to get what he wanted. Alex, in contrast, relied on his entitlement.

  The days were full for the birds, with training sessions, sometimes testing, often being entertained by the students, or, in Alex’s case, ordering them around. Come five o’clock, the students left for the day, and then it was just me and the birds, hanging out. Kyo was less sociable and preferred to go to his cage at this point. I then had dinner, with Alex and Griffin as company. Dining company, really, because they insisted on sharing my food. They loved green beans and broccoli. My job was to make sure it was equal shares, otherwise there would be loud complaints. “Green bean,” Alex would yell if he thought Griffin had had one too many. Same with Griffin.

  Later in their relationship they developed a comical little duet: “Green,” Alex would pipe up.

  “Bean,” Griffin responded.

  “Green.”

  “Bean.”

  “Green.”

  “Bean.” They would go on like that, alternating, with ever more gusto.

  After dinner I took them to my office and placed them on their respective perches, so they could watch me do e-mail and work at my computer. They would constantly ask for treats, such as nuts, corn, and pasta. Alex’s perch always had to be a little higher than Griffin’s, as he was “senior bird.” Wherever we were, Alex had to be top bird, quite literally. Alex always remained jealous of Griffin, perhaps because of the attention we gave Griffin when he was a chick. Whatever the reason, if I came into the lab and said hello to Griffin before acknowledging Alex, I could forget about working with Alex. He would sulk the whole day.

  Our plans to have Alex act as a tutor to Griffin worked out to a degree. But Griff always learned more efficiently when he had two human tutors rather than one of us and Alex. We aren’t exactly sure why. There are several possibilities. One is that Alex always treated poor Griffin as if he were a pain in the butt, and perhaps Griffin felt inhibited by that. And at the time, Alex wouldn’t question Griffin, so we couldn’t exchange roles of model/rival and trainer, a crucial part of the procedure. Or maybe Griffin figured that the exchanges between Alex and the students were special pair-bonding duets in which he wasn’t supposed to engage; Greys in the wild do have such duets with their mates.

  Also, Alex could often not resist showing off. He’d sometimes give the right answer when Griffin hesitated. Or he’d tell Griffin, “Say better,” which meant Griffin should speak more clearly. Alex also occasionally gave wrong answers, apparently to confuse Griffin. Griffin was always good-natured and put up with Alex’s antics and high-handedness.

  Alex was happy in the lab, as were the other birds.
And why not? They enjoyed far more attention than the vast majority of pet birds. But from time to time I took Alex home with me, to give him a change of scenery. He loved to sit by the window and see the trees and sun himself. It wasn’t always easy having him at the house, because he wanted me constantly with him. He hated to be put in his cage during the daytime, if I needed to do an errand, for instance. But as long as I was there and he was free to sit near me, he couldn’t be happier.

  All that changed one day in 1998. I had just brought him into the house and set him on a perch when he became terribly distressed, squawking and saying, “Wanna go back…wanna go back!”

  I rushed to him and asked, “What’s wrong, Alex? What’s wrong?”

  I looked out of the window and quickly realized what alarmed him. A pair of western screech owls were building a nest in the roof over the patio. They apparently struck terror into poor Alex, even though he had never seen an owl in his entire life. I tried to calm him, with little success. I pulled the drapes, so he could no longer see the owls. Still no use.

  “Wanna go back…wanna go back!”

  It was a great demonstration of object permanence. Even though Alex could no longer see the owls, he knew they were still there. And even though they were outside the house and he was safely inside, he was still terrified.

  Reluctantly and sadly, I packed him into his cage and drove him back to the lab that evening. I knew he would never return, that this was the last time in my house for Alex and me. I saw, too, that even though he had lived his whole life in the company of humans, even though he had lived all but one of his years with me, even though I thought of him as my Alex, there was, and always would be, something in him beyond the reach of any person, even me. When the image of that little owl entered Alex’s brain, a brain innocent of any such images, it triggered an urgent and instinctive message: Predator, danger, hide! It was a primal response, something imprinted in his DNA.

  And I could not calm him.

  Chapter 7

  Alex Goes Hi-Tech

  My students and I spent countless hours with Alex, teaching him to produce and comprehend labels for objects and concepts. His achievements were impressive. But often it was the labels and phrases he picked up in passing that were especially memorable. So it was when Alex told me one day to “calm down.”

  As the 1990s drew to a close, my work environment became more and more stressful. Although I had been granted tenure not long after moving to Tucson, I was still an associate professor. In 1996, I came up for promotion to full professor, which was denied. Although it was never stated explicitly, my oddball circumstance—a chemist in a biology department—did not help my case, I’m sure. What was explicit was increasing pressure on me to teach introductory biology. I felt that was entirely inappropriate for someone with my background. I considered the courses I did teach—animal-human communication, for example—to be valuable contributions to the department of a major university. Instead, they were dismissed as “designer courses,” not germane to producing the maximum number of graduates each year.

  Also resented was my public exposure, with Alex starring in so many television and print stories. Jealousy is corrosive. When the time came for my sabbatical in 1997, the year following my nonpromotion, I grasped it eagerly. I had won a Guggenheim Fellowship that would enable me to write up my two decades of work with Alex, in The Alex Studies, a book with Harvard University Press. And it gave me a break from the day-to-day rancor. Yet it probably caused even more ill will. I was asked to put the sabbatical aside and teach intro biology; again I declined.

  As Tolstoy might say, every unhappy workplace is unhappy in its own ways, but the pattern is the same: some mixes of people, rules, and settings just don’t add up to a positive result. I won’t bore you with the details, just one funny Alex story. After one meeting in early fall 1998, after I returned from my sabbatical, I was irked more than usual. Exactly why, I cannot recall. In any case, I was fuming when I left the meeting, cursing my fate at being stuck where I was, with no prospect of a way out.

  Usually when I walked down the corridor to the lab I would hear a cheery whistle from Alex, his greeting to me. He had grown familiar with the sound of my footsteps on the tiled floor, and that was his signal to begin his greeting. On this occasion, however, there was no whistle. I flung the door open and stormed into the lab.

  Alex looked at me and said, “Calm down!” He must have heard something distinctive in my footsteps that alerted him to my emotional state. I stopped in my tracks when I heard him say that. Had I not been so annoyed, I might have said something like, “Wow, guys, did you hear what Alex just said?” But I didn’t. Instead I looked directly at Alex and snapped, “Don’t tell me to calm down!” I slunk into my office.

  About a year later, that little interchange was printed in the New York Times as its quote of the day. A reporter for the Times had included the quote in a story about Alex and me. “Sometimes,” she said in the story, “Dr. Pepperberg and Alex squabble like an old married couple.”

  About a month later, I received an e-mail out of the blue from Michael Bove, head of the Consumer Electronics Laboratory at MIT’s Media Lab. Would I like to give a lecture at the Lab on my work with Alex? Conceived in 1980 by architecture professor Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT president Jerome Wiesner, the Media Lab had become one of the most celebrated research institutions in the United States, at least according to the popular press. It had a reputation for supporting brilliant, wacky techno-geeks whose mission was “inventing the future,” as Stewart Brand put it in his 1987 book on the Lab. It defined “cool” in the related worlds of technology and communications.

  So I was aware of the place from what I’d read in newspaper and magazine articles, although I could not imagine why they would want to hear from a woman who talks to parrots. Nevertheless, I said yes. At the very least I would visit my beloved Boston.

  The Media Lab is housed in a suitably futuristic, white-tiled building on Ames Street in Cambridge, known locally as “Pei’s Toilet” after its famous architect, I. M. Pei. I arrived in early December and was met by Mike Bove. Mike offered to show me around before we had lunch, and he warned me, “The Media Lab is very often a bit of a shocking place for people who have never been here before.” He was right. You emerge from elevators on the third floor to be confronted by a teenage boy’s wildest dream of technology heaven. It’s all glass walls and computers and, in the Lab’s lingo, “stuff” everywhere: on the floors, on the walls, hanging from the ceiling. Mike told me that at night the corridors are haunted with crazy things like mini-robots and odd automatons roaming around.

  The free spirit of the place encourages innovation and rebelliousness as the norm. Being on the edge was not just allowed but expected. Different sections of the third floor were known variously as the Garden, the Jungle, and the Pond, the last referring to the primordial ooze from which all kinds of unexpected creatures might emerge. Nothing I had read or seen prepared me for how far outside the normal bounds of doing and thinking the Lab really was. I was entranced.

  Over lunch, Mike casually said, “Have you ever thought about spending a year on leave here?” I was stunned. Such a thought had never even crossed my mind. But I knew instantly that this was where I wanted to be more than anything. I said something like, “Oh. How fast do you want me here?” and “If you want me permanently, I can arrange that, too.” I was ecstatic. Here was an opportunity to move beyond the rut in which I had found myself in Tucson. I felt I would be coming home geographically, to Boston, and intellectually, in the way I liked to function as a scientist. At least I’d have some fun for a year. Who knew what might lie beyond that?

  There was only one problem. Although I would be able to work on my parrot studies, I didn’t feel right about moving Alex across the country twice in one year, so I made the painful decision to leave him in the capable hands of my lab colleagues and students and endure a year’s separation. When I drove out of Tucson for Boston the
following August, it was with very mixed feelings. Ahead lay the promise of a year of exciting science of a kind I had never dreamt: applying cutting-edge technology to cognitive questions I had thought about for so long, and in the company of freewheeling thinkers. What more could I have asked for, a permanent job aside? Well, Alex. I arranged to spend one week in four back in Tucson, keeping the lab going, advising the students, and seeing Alex and the other birds. I had always traveled a good deal through the years, so being separated from Alex for a few days wasn’t new. But this was serious separation. It would be hard, for me and for Alex.

  One of my first tasks at MIT was to find a Grey for my new work there. I had spent much of the previous six months thinking about what I might do at the Lab. The reason I had been invited was a shared interest in intelligent learning systems. Several people there were studying computers as learning systems, and hoped to use my parrot studies as models. We could learn from each other in this realm. But I saw other possibilities. One of my longstanding concerns was finding ways to keep pet parrots from getting bored, which is a common problem. They are highly social, highly intelligent creatures. If they don’t have constant attention and things to do, they become distressed, sometimes to the point of being psychotic. They may screech and pluck their feathers. Many people who get Greys and other parrots as pets don’t appreciate this about their birds. It is quite cruel to leave them in a cage by themselves all day long. I’ve given many a talk at bird clubs about this issue.

  Given the Media Lab’s resources, I wondered if I could use technology to keep domestic parrots entertained and happy. I needed a Grey that was old enough to manipulate simple equipment. A baby bird would not do. I got Wart, a one-year-old Grey, from Kim Gaudette, a parrot breeder in Connecticut. Actually, we named him Arthur, but he was immediately known as Wart, the name Merlin the magician gave the young King Arthur. Poor Wart had a damaged foot from an accident as chick. He could perch and pick up food, but he wasn’t as stable as other Greys. We didn’t clip his wings as much as usual, so he could save himself if he fell off a perch. This led to more than one occasion when Wart took off and flew loops around the Pond, causing great consternation and amusement. He also liked to visit his favorite secretary, who fed him forbidden potato chips and french fries.