Alex the Parrot died last week at the age of 31. We post this story from the Summer 2004 issue of Seed in his memory.
Illustrations by Andrew Kuo, Photograph by John Woo
If Alex were a dog, he would be 189 years old. But he's a parrot and he's 27. In parrot years that's 27. Unless Alex chokes on a nut or falls out of his cage, he should live another 50 years. In a perfect world, healthy parrots can live 80 to 90 years. Dr. Irene Pepperberg found Alex in a Chicago pet store near O'Hare Airport when he was a year old. He was one of eight birds sitting in a cage, waiting to be adopted. There was nothing special about Alex that caught Pepperberg's eye. She needed a bird and simply told the storeowner to reach in and pick one out. Bird in hand, Pepperberg returned to her lab at Purdue University to begin her research. And so began Alex's career as the world's smartest parrot.
Alex is an African Grey parrot, but in all likelihood, he wasn't born in Africa. Like most birds in pet shops, he was probably bred as a "domestic" in North America, but that's all we know about Alex's early history. We don't know how his parents are or his exact birth date. Some of this mystery was appealing to Pepperberg in her search for the perfect specimen to test her theories about avian intelligence. She didn't want anyone thinking she'd picked a "super" bird that had been bred especially for smarts. In Pepperberg's hands, Alex (whose name stands for Avian Learning Experiment) was going to show the world that parrots can do more than, well, parrot. Namely, they can mean what they say. If Polly wants a cracker, she really wants a cracker. Or, as Pepperberg explains it, birds can think. And not in the way you've seen your dog thinking when you catch him staring at the exact spot on the kitchen floor where you dropped a pot roast six months ago. According to Pepperberg, Alex his the cognitive abilities of a 6-year-old child. He can identify objects, colors, and shapes, and he's not just repeating what he hears. This is a substantial claim, given that Alex's brain is the size of a shelled walnut.
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Twenty-five years ago this claim meant a radical paradigm shift in the study of animal intelligence—a shift that's still happening today. In this venture, apparently, size really does matter, and until Alex came along, the study of cognition, and especially the acquisition of language, had focused exclusively on large primate brains with frontal lobes. The idea of jumping from that group to one entirely outside the mammalian class was hard for many to swallow. But to Pepperberg, that seemed a little like the guy who loses his keys in a park at night but then searches for them under the street lamp because that's where the light is best. Sure, primate brains look a lot like ours, but why not throw the net a little wider? A parrot's ability to speak—barring a real-life Planet of the Apes—represents a significant built-in starting point for communication. Given the opportunity, what else might these birds be capable of? To Pepperberg it was a reasonable question—but when she applied for her first NIH grant, they told her to go pound sand. When she came back the second time, she brought Alex's first report card, which showed he was recognizing and naming objects. This time, they didn't say no. If Pepperberg could put her money where he parrot was, Alex would be poised to crash the gates of the exclusive "frontal lobes only" intelligence club. A thinking bird would topple everything we'd previously assumed about animal intelligence.