Does Polly want a cracker... or a good book?

THE Einstein of the bird world has died. Alex, an African grey parrot who lived in Waltham Massachusetts, was found dead on September 6th. A postmortem examination failed to establish the cause of death but Alex didn’t die of old age.

African greys can reach 50 or more; at 31, he was in the prime of life. The “sage in a cage” will be missed; Alex, whose name is an acronym of “Avian Learning Experiment”, confounded scientists, challenging their assumptions about “bird brains”.

The famous bird’s career began in 1977 when he was purchased from a Chicago pet shop by Dr Irene Pepperberg, an animal behaviour scientist. Parrots are excellent mimics. In the wild, this ability enables a bird arriving in an area to pick up the local accent and be accepted by resident parrots. A captive bird, it is thought, mimics human speech to impress its human flock members. A talking bird is not saying anything, just blathering “parrot fashion”. Meaningful discourse is impossible for a creature with a brain the size of a walnut, or so it was thought until Alex arrived on the scene.