PARROT PEOPLE

Irene Pepperberg: The woman behind
the most famous parrot in the world

"TELL ME what’s different," asks the young woman with long dark hair. She holds two keys, one metal and a bigger one that’s green, in front of an attentive bird.

The grey parrot eyes the keys briefly then looks up at the woman. "Color," it answers in a clear, childlike voice.

"Yes, color. What color bigger?"

"Green."

"Green, you’re right!"

Ever since this astounding exchange between Alex, the now-famous talking African grey, and his trainer, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, on the Discovery Channel 20 years ago, parrot owners the world over have dreamed of teaching their own birds the art of good conversation.

"How was your day, Petey?"

"Just swell, Bob. How about some millet? And while you’re up, could you change my paper?"

Although such freewheeling chats probably will always remain in the realm of wishful thinking, Alex the parrot has proven just how much intelligence does dwell in the underestimated craniums of our feathered friends.

Today the talented psittacine can identify, categorize, request or refuse a total of 100 objects, including seven colors and five shapes. He has even begun learning a rudimentary form of reading.

From pet store to celebrity
Alex, a Chicago pet-store bird before he became an international celebrity, may be the most clever parrot in history. And he owes it all to Pepperberg, a professor at MIT.

A Ph.D. in chemistry turned avian researcher, Pepperberg has drilled Alex in his P’s and Q’s for a quarter of a century this year. She hopes to teach her famous protégé and his two younger African grey sidekicks, Wart and Griffin, a lot more, including how to use a computer.

Unfortunately, The Alex Foundation, a nonprofit entity Pepperberg created 10 years ago to help fund her work, is navigating troubled financial waters at the moment.

Despite last year’s publication of the ambitious 448-page The Alex Studies, Pepperberg’s first hard-cover account of her work for the popular press, the National Science Foundation has turned down her last several grant requests.

Without the support of her primary benefactor, Pepperberg has had to scale back her research, including graduate students’ trips to Africa to study wild greys. Instead, she has had to spend more time on the road herself to raise the $75,000 to $100,000 in funds she needs annually to continue.

Pepperberg speaks widely on her research at animal behavior conferences and other forums. Twice a month she participates in

Photo courtesy of David Carter. Visitors to the The Alex Foundation's Web site can buy this 8 X 10 portrait of Irene Pepperberg and her famous protege for $25.

pet-club fundraisers. Pepperberg’s Web site brings in a small amount of money selling her $35.95 videocassette, "Training Your Parrot the Alex Way," and an autographed, glossy color 8 X 10 of her and Alex for $25.

"Right now my hobby is trying to get more than six hours of sleep on the weekends," she comments wryly. "I enjoy dinners with friends, reading, listening to music, but there’s really not much time for any of that."

Pepperberg attributes her current financial difficulties to the scientific community’s continued resistance to the idea of a bird that can think.

"It’s been very difficult," she admits, "and I think it always will be because people do not want to think a creature with a brain the size of a walnut has-not the language ability-but the intellectual ability, of a four-year-old child.

"We can accept this with a chimpanzee, because they’re more like us. We can accept this with a dolphin, because it’s this big-brained mammal. But not a bird."

Goodall admirer
How did a chemistry whiz from Brooklyn wind up collaborating with a gabby parrot from the Windy City?

Pepperberg gives partial credit to her parents, a homemaker and an elementary school teacher, for bringing home a parakeet when she was 4 ½. The only pet the family could keep in their apartment, located over a storefront, it was the first of several budgies Pepperberg would own as a child.

The pioneering work of chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall, one of the few prominent female scientists at the time, also made an impression on the young Pepperberg.

“Like most girls growing up in the fifties, I followed her with interest,” she remembers.

With careers in animal behavior nonexistent at the time, Pepperberg at first decided to pursue chemistry, something at which she had always excelled. A gifted student, she entered MIT at the age of 16 and earned her master’s degree in chemistry from Harvard six years later in 1971.

But Pepperberg remained fascinated with animal intelligence. While a graduate student in chemical physics at Harvard, a TV special on animal communication inspired her to renew her dream of carving a career in the field. She began to take courses in avian biology and human language acquisition, followed by more intense studies in ethology, biology and neurobiology after she received her doctorate in 1976.

In 1977, Pepperberg moved to Purdue University with her then-husband, an assistant professor of electrical sciences and neurobiology, and set up her first lab in a corner of the biology department.

She chose the African grey parrot as the animal with which she would try to bridge the interspecies communication gap. German scientists who had done limited work with the birds in the 1940s and ‘50s had already proven grey parrots were intelligent.

She began to call around to find a pet shop that sold African greys and eventually purchased a year-old bird at a store 122 miles away in Chicago.

"I generally tell people that if they’re going to buy a pet bird, they should get it from a breeder or a pet store that does its own breeding so they know where it’s coming from," says Pepperberg of her decision to go the pet-store route. "But I had to show that Alex was not a specially-bred bird. He had to be chosen at random so I could show there was nothing special about him."

Pepperberg named the young bird Alex, for Avian Learning Experiment.

Rewards that made sense
In setting up her first experiments with Alex, Pepperberg decided to adopt some of the techniques used by the previous generation of researchers--but rejected others as flawed.

One teaching method she liked was the model-rival form of training pioneered by German ethologist Dietmar Todt.

In this method, Pepperberg and a volunteer student handled an object and discussed it while Alex watched. When the student correctly labeled an object, Pepperberg rewarded him by giving him the object.

If he was incorrect, Pepperberg took the object away. The demonstration was designed to both teach Alex and make him a little jealous, so he would want to handle and name the object himself.

To guard against teaching Alex to respond to only one person, Pepperberg modified the method slightly by reversing the roles occasionally, with the student questioning the trainer.

Another change Pepperberg made was to use intrinsic, or related-rather than extrinsic, or unrelated--rewards. This meant she would reward Alex with the object he correctly labeled, rather than an unrelated object, a common training method she believed only caused confusion.

For instance, when Alex correctly identified a cork, he was given the cork as his reward, not his favorite food, a cashew. To sweeten the exercise for Alex, Pepperberg then allowed the bird to request something he really wanted-such as the cashew (“nut”) or a slice of banana.

Mastering the letter "p"
The techniques paid off quickly. Within two weeks, Alex was attempting to identify his first object, a torn piece of index card, as "a-er."

"He left out the 'p’s' at first because they were too difficult to pronounce," recalls Pepperberg. It took several months for Alex to pronounce "paper" clearly, but after that he quickly mastered "key," "wood" and "rawhide."

For the color red, Alex was taught "rose" instead.

"Birds learn vowels first, and we already had a word with the ‘eh’ sound-‘peg’, for a wooden clothespin. We didn’t want to confuse him."

By 1981, Alex could identify objects by name, shape and color, averaging 80 percent accuracy in more than 200 tests, and Pepperberg wrote her first scientific paper, "Functional Vocalizations by an Africa Grey Parrot," the first of over 50 so far featuring Alex.

The reception was cool.

The paper "was rejected by major animal science and behavior experts first. I finally got it published in the Journal of Animal Psychology (now called Ethology)," Pepperberg recalls.

Two years later Pepperberg was formally appointed a research associate in biology at Purdue. She remained there until joining Northwestern as a visiting assistant professor in anthropology in 1984. She left Northwestern in 1991 for the University of Arizona at Tucson, where she became an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Psychology.

In 1999, Pepperberg returned to her alma mater as a visiting associate professor in MIT’s Media Laboratory. Last month, she became a permanent half-time staff member, a position that leaves her plenty of time to travel on behalf of her research.

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