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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: September 2007

African gray parrot Alex, 31, taught the world about bird brains

 

Alex, 31, African gray parrot companion and experimental subject of Brandeis University and Harvard University comparative psychologist Irene Pepperberg since 1977, was found dead in his cage of an unknown cause on the morning of September 9, 2007.

Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex at a pet store. Despite centuries of anecdotal evidence of avian intelligence, and documented evidence that pigeons could quickly learn complex tasks through operant conditioning, scientists then had little appreciation of the depth and range of bird intelligence.

Alex, however, quickly demonstrated that he was not only a "talking parrot," but a parrot who understood at an early age how to assemble words to communicate complex and original ideas.

Pepperberg changed her career focus to explore in a series of peer-reviewed studies just how much Alex could learn.

Alex developed a vocabulary of 50 to 100 words, identified colors and shapes, counted to five, and in early 2007 demonstrated through volunteering information during an exercise that he grasped the concept of zero.

While there is no scientifically accepted protocol for demonstrating a sense of humor, Alex was also by many accounts a wit and a prankster, who would often use various ruses to end experiments he found tedious.

His fame contributed to popularizing the acquisition of African gray parrots as faddish pets, leading to intensive wild captures and export under conditions causing the deaths of more birds than reached the U.S. and Europe safely. Exposés of the traffic and disease outbreaks associated with it eventually brought the passage of the 1993 law forbidding the import of wild-caught birds into the U.S.

In his final days Alex was working with Pepperberg to learn compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. Wrote Benedict Corey of The New York Times, "As Pepperberg put him into his cage for the night," the evening before his death, "Alex looked at her and said, "You be good. See you tomorrow. I love you."