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

  Arthur (Wart) and Serial Tr-Hacking: Depending on which box has a nut, Arthur will have to “read” its arrow and pull the lever out or up, or give it a twist it to get the reward. Photo by Ben Resner

  Alex has conned a student into tickling him instead of doing a session. Photo by Karla Zimonja

  Alex checking out his daily breakfast of fresh organic vegetables and fruits. Photo by Karla Zimonja

  Balancing all three birds for a “beauty shot”; Alex has to be closest to Irene’s face. Photo by Mike Lovett

  Jesse (left) and Jessica praise Alex when he correctly answered the question, “What number green?” Photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe

  Alex’s 30th hatchday, 2006: “Yummy bread!” Photo by Arlene Levin-Rowe

  Alex, on “the chair,” keeps Irene company as she checks e-mail. Photo by William Munoz

  Alex on his training perch, resting between trials. Photo by Karla Zimonja

  I returned to Purdue after the conference, still stunned. I went into the lab and heard Alex’s now familiar “Come here” greeting as I approached the curtain that partitioned off his area. I pushed it aside, and there he was, waiting for me. Then he added something he had begun to say from time to time: “I love you,” learned from the students. I went to his cage, where he was perched on top, displaying excitement at my return. He raised his wings slightly and lifted a foot, so I offered my hand as a perch. “Thank you, Alex,” I said, as he climbed onto my hand. “What have we got ourselves into, buddy?” He didn’t seem concerned. He happily preened himself.

  We had developed a degree of intimacy by this time, of course. We often spent eight hours a day together. But from the very start of The Alex Project I had determined that my professional approach would be rigorous in training and in testing my Grey. I had come from the so-called hard sciences, after all. I needed my data to be unimpeachable, to meet high standards of credibility. I wouldn’t let emotion cloud my judgment. I wouldn’t get too attached. My experience at the Clever Hans battle made me even more determined to maintain as much of an emotional barrier as was feasible between Alex and me in order to keep that credibility intact, no matter how hard it would be. And it was hard.

  Alex and I were like vagabonds during our seven-plus years at Purdue, lugging our limited belongings from temporary lab to temporary lab, constantly in search of more permanent space. We never found it. There was an amusing biblical aspect to our wanderings, too. We coped with more than one laboratory flood, which required evacuating a freaked-out Alex from rising waters in the middle of the night. And pestilence: the cockroaches were always awful. No matter where we were, all the rooms adjacent to ours were regularly sprayed for roaches, but we couldn’t do that, for fear of poisoning Alex. As a result, we seemed to be a haven for bands of refugee roaches. We had to literally vacuum them out of drawers every week and spray the floors with alcohol. We put stickies around Alex’s cage in an attempt to trap the beasties. It didn’t always work very well, and sometimes there were roaches in his water in the morning. Alex hated it as much as we did.

  When news of the NSF grant had arrived back in 1979, it had provided us with a little stability, inasmuch as I finally got a real position: a lowly research associateship for one year. But things were beginning to look up. I began to give presentations about our work at local and national animal behavior meetings. The NSF grant was extended for a second year; my big paper was published in the German journal early in 1981. Reaction among my peers was, I have to say, rather muted. But it did prompt the beginning of public recognition: first in Omni magazine, then a snippet in the New York Times, followed by a piece in the popular journal Science 82; our local TV station did a spot on Alex, too. More people in the department were willing to openly support our “edgy” work and ideas, but there were always more or less vocal detractors.

  There would be bumps ahead, but we were moving in the right direction. Together, Alex and I would show them what it really means to be a birdbrain.

  We had already shown that Alex could appropriately label objects, which he wasn’t supposed to be able to do; that he could correctly label colors, which he was not supposed to be able to do; and he had a functional use of “no,” which he was not supposed to be able to do.

  He was also on his way to understanding concepts—such as color and shape—at a higher level of cognition. It was one thing for us to ask Alex to identify an object and for him to correctly say “green key” or “four-corner wood.” But it was quite another for him to see a piece of blue three-corner paper or red four-corner hide and correctly respond to separate questions such as “What color?” or “What shape?” (Actually, we had to give up on the paper objects, because when he chewed them the vegetable dyes came off on his beak and transferred to his feathers, his feet, his perches, and ultimately his trainers—a colorful mess.)

  To answer “What color?” and “What shape?” correctly, Alex needed to understand the concept of color and shape as categories that contained the labels “green,” “blue,” “three-corner,” and “four-corner,” not simply labels by themselves. He passed that test during his third year of study, and, of course, he was not supposed to be able to do that, either. This was grist for another scientific paper, published in 1983. So far, everything that Alex was not supposed to be able to do, because he was a mere birdbrain, he had done.

  Meanwhile, Alex was up to all kinds of mischievousness in the lab, which he was not supposed to do, either. Trouble is, Greys just love to chew things. It’s their nature. But Alex, being Alex, loved to chew important things, such as telephone cables (thus disabling two professors’ lines as well as mine) and my lecture slides, in the days when it took weeks of labor to prepare them. And more. Back in 1979, he had a go at the grant proposal to NSF that got me my first funding. The panel had obviously been impressed with it, but that was only after Alex had expressed his own avian opinion. I had spent the previous night and the whole of the morning putting the finishing touches to this twenty-page document that carried so much of my hopes, crafted on a borrowed electric typewriter. I stacked it neatly, put it on my desk, and met a colleague for lunch. Big mistake.

  I returned to find most edges heavily chewed. It was unsalvageable—I’d have to retype the whole thing. Damn it! I had only a few hours to photocopy it and mail it out. I responded irrationally, as humans often do in such circumstances: I shrieked at Alex, yelling stupidly, “How could you do such a thing, Alex?” Easy—he’s a parrot.

  Alex then employed something he’d learned recently in similar circumstances. He cowered a little, looked at me, and said, “I’m sorry…I’m sorry.”

  That stopped my ranting. I went to him and apologized. “It’s OK, Alex. It’s not your fault.”

  How had Alex’s use of “I’m sorry” come about? Shortly before the grant-chewing incident, Alex was on a high perch and we were just hanging out, chatting, nothing formal. I was drinking coffee. He was preening and making contented noises. I put my cup on the base of the perch and went to the washroom. I came back to find Alex wading in spilled coffee on the floor among shards of broken coffee cup. I was panicked, afraid he’d hurt himself, and yelled, “How could you do that?” Alex must have simply knocked the cup off the base as he went to investigate—an accident. But I yelled anyway, until I realized that I was the stupid one, doing the yelling. I got down to make sure he was OK, and said, “I’m sorry…I’m sorry.” He obviously learned that “I’m sorry” is associated with defusing a tense, angry, and potentially dangerous moment. That’s why he applied it to the grant-chewing incident, when I was again stupidly yelling at him. Who is the birdbrain?

  Alex became more subtle in his use of “I’m sorry.” Alex was wonderful with training and testing when he wanted to be, and not when he wasn’t. Usually when he was uninterested in working, he would ignore us, preen, or say “Wanna go back,” meaning he wanted to go back to his cage. Late in March 1980, however, he did something new. I and Susan Reed, a student, were trying to test him. Alex w
as completely recalcitrant, refusing to do anything. “Alex wouldn’t test,” I wrote in my journal. I was a little pissed off, probably in a bad mood myself, and abruptly started to leave the room, annoyance evident in every aspect of my body language. Next thing I heard was “I’m sorry.” It was Alex. I went back in. Hmm, I thought, does he mean that?

  A little later that morning, another student, Bruce Rosen, was working with Alex, playing with a plastic cup. Alex accidentally knocked it to the floor. Alex wasn’t aware that I was watching him. And he said again, to Bruce this time, “I’m sorry.” I went to him and said, “It’s OK, Alex; it’s all forgiven.”

  I wrote in my journal that evening, “Does he understand?” I meant, did he feel remorse, such as you or I might feel when we say “I’m sorry”? Or was it simply a means of defusing anger? Either way, it was an effective mode of communication. As he grew older, he began to say “I’m sorry” in an ever more pathetic, “I’m really, really sorry” tone of voice, which always had the effect of melting my heart, no matter how he meant it.

  Ever since the phone wire chewing incident, students were instructed not to leave Alex alone in the lab. He simply couldn’t be trusted not to get into trouble, no matter how short the window of opportunity. Sometimes they would put him in his cage if they had to leave for a while. He didn’t much like that. When it was a quick trip to the washroom, and when he had pretty much lost his fear of strangers, the students would sometimes take him with them. He definitely liked that, especially if someone else came in so he could show off, whistling or talking, “Want nut,” “Want corn,” and so on.

  Now, these trips to the washroom brought up another issue—but first I must digress. Fairly early on I had planned to use a two-way mirror in the lab for observing Alex unseen by him. Alex’s cage was supposedly angled so that he would not see himself. But such was not to be. “Introduced Alex to the ‘bird in the mirror’ today,” I wrote in my journal. “What a flaky parrot—he’s truly scared of himself.” We obviously can’t know what he was thinking. But when I pulled back the screen that had until this time covered the mirror, all of a sudden there appeared to be a window in the room. Alex looked, saw “another bird,” and was visibly scared. “He actually crawled to me for comfort,” I wrote, “which shows how freaked out he was.” I doubt that, from his viewing angle, he could really have made any connection between himself and this other creature; even to me, it looked like another room with another bird.

  As time passed Alex grew less timid with the situation. That was a good thing, because the washroom where the students occasionally took him had a very large mirror above the sinks. Alex used to march up and down the little shelf in front of this mirror, making noise, looking around, demanding things. Then one day in December 1980 when Kathy Davidson took him to the washroom, Alex seemed really to notice the mirror for the first time. He turned to look right into it, cocked his head back and forth a few times to get a fuller look, and said, “What’s that?”

  “That’s you,” Kathy answered. “You’re a parrot.”

  Alex looked some more and then said, “What color?”

  Kathy said, “Gray. You’re a gray parrot, Alex.” The two of them went through that sequence a couple more times. And that’s how Alex learned the color gray.

  We don’t know what else Alex learned from the mirror that day, what thoughts were in his mind as he saw his reflection in the mirror. But it did mean that formal mirror tests were now impossible.

  Chapter 5

  What’s a Banerry?

  The July 4 holiday in 1984 was our last day at Purdue, our last day in West Lafayette, Indiana. Movers packed our belongings and I packed the lab, Alex included, into a rented station wagon. A student and I drove the 120 miles to the town of Wilmette, Illinois, about sixteen miles north of downtown Chicago, on Lake Michigan. David’s post at Purdue had ended, and we’d had to move on. He obtained a faculty position at the University of Illinois–Chicago, and I had snagged a temporary, one-year appointment at nearby Northwestern University, in Evanston. We drove at night, hoping that Alex would sleep through the trip. It was his first time in a car since the original stressful drive from Chicago. But Alex was awake and alert the whole time. He held on to the side of his cage with one claw, looking just like a New York City strap-hanging subway rider.

  We had left behind the endless miles of cornfields and successions of summer tornadoes that, for me, defined West Lafayette. Alex had been terrified by the tornadoes. He could sense the change in air pressure long before we were aware of anything: the only thing that soothed him as the storms raged was Haydn’s cello concerto, which sometime swept him into a trancelike state, his body moving gently, eyes squinting almost shut.

  Before us lay a new life in Illinois, and a new Alex. Alex was no longer anxious and skittish around strangers. Quite the opposite. He had learned that by asking for things he was in control of his environment, because when he asked for things we gave them to him. He liked that. He let it be known to newcomers very clearly and very quickly that they had to obey, as my friend Barbara Katz discovered on her first encounter with Alex. Barbara, who was in charge of birds at Lincoln Park Zoo, and I met in a doctor’s office in Evanston soon after I arrived in town. We became fast friends.

  Very shortly afterward I had to leave town for a conference in Boston. I asked Barbara if she would look in on Alex and the students while I was gone. She said she would be delighted. I was confident that her years of work at the zoo would equip her to handle Alex. Here’s how she later described the encounter:

  I was an experienced bird handler and I thought it would be a simple matter.

  I arrive at the lab early in the afternoon to find Alex happily destroying an old wooden cabinet while the students sat helplessly in chairs a few feet away.

  “Hi Alex. How’s it going?”

  “I want walnut,” he declared in his charming sing-song voice.

  “Alex,” I said gently, “you eat too many nuts. Irene said to offer you fruit if you started asking for treats. How about a grape?”

  “I want walnut.”

  “No walnuts. How about some banana?”

  “I want walnut!”

  “Okay, just one.”

  I removed one walnut piece from a metal tin and held it in my outstretched hand. Alex deftly reached over and took it. He nibbled it, eating tiny pieces until it was all gone except for some telltale crumbs at the sides of his beak.

  “I want walnut.”

  “No, you just had one. How about a grape?” I sensed trouble ahead.

  “I want water.”

  “That’s a good idea, Alex.” I held out his small white plastic cup. Alex drank two sips, then pulled the cup from my hand and contemptuously tossed it on the floor.

  This was the new Alex. The boss.

  Aside from being “pretty crazy for several days” immediately after our move, Alex was becoming more and more confident. Within less than two weeks, he was responding correctly to “What color?” when I showed him a three-corner gray wood. “Gray,” he said. Then “Gray wood.” “This after a long break, IN NEW LAB, NEW PEOPLE and NO TRAINING,” I wrote in my journal. The not-so-subtle emphasis in my writing expressed my delight at Alex’s supremely capable performance.

  When David learned in the summer of 1983 that he would be moving to the University of Illinois, I’d had to scramble for a job. At one point I faced the prospect of taking Alex to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where a friend offered some lab space for Alex and me for a year. Not ideal. At the very last minute, a one-year slot opened up in the anthropology department at Northwestern University for a visiting assistant professor who could teach animal behavior. I grabbed it. I remember thinking, Hey, you have a job. OK, it’s only a year and there’s no chance for tenure, but it’s a job. You have some grant money. You are being paid to teach. Not bad!

  The anthropology department’s labs were in Swift Hall, on the north end of campus, on the lake. Physically, N
orthwestern’s campus was gorgeous. I was given one room on an upper floor of Swift Hall for Alex and a little office on the ground floor. There wasn’t much in the lab, just the ratty desk, on top of which sat Alex’s cage, and a small folding metal chair on which Alex loved to perch. My office had a desk, a bookcase, and a chair. The ceilings were high. Overall, the place felt rather dungeonlike, as a friend put it. But it was our space, and Alex and I made good use of it.

  A few months after we moved in, a student volunteered to help in the lab. In exchange, I offered to train his parrot, who at that point was wordless. The parrot’s favorite thing in the world was apple, so we decided to train her to produce the label “apple.” Alex would take part, too. We had never before used food items as training objects with Alex, so this was going to be an exception. Alex had acquired “grape,” “banana,” and “cherry” on his own, because we named everything we fed him. “Apple” was therefore going to be his fourth fruit label. Or so we thought. Alex apparently had other ideas.

  By the end of the season for fresh apples, Alex had learned to produce a puny little “puh” sound, a pathetic fragment of “apple.” Nothing more. And he entirely refused to eat apple. We decided to try again the next spring, when fresh apples would arrive from the Southern Hemisphere. Months later Alex did condescend unenthusiastically to eat some apple when offered, but still only produced “puh.”

  Then suddenly, in the second week of training in mid-March 1985, he looked at the apple quite intently, looked at me, and said “Banerry…I want banerry.” He snatched a bite of the apple and ate it happily. He looked as if he had suddenly achieved something he had been searching for.