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.

Pepperberg began teaching Alex to name objects, using a training method called “model/rival” or MR. This requires two people. One acts as instructor, the other as a “rival” pupil. Parrots are sociable birds, used to competing for food and partners. Alex watched what his rival did to get rewards of food. Then he copied the behaviour.

He learned the names of up to 50 objects. He could identify materials such as paper, wood and water. Colours and shapes were no problem to him. He could even combine words, issuing requests such as “come here” or “feed me”. Most astonishingly of all, he seemed to have mastered the notion of absence; he would use the word “no” when an empty tray was presented to him. Linguists consider the concept of negation to be quite advanced. Pepperberg became convinced that Alex was not just indulging in mimicry but was expressing thoughts and emotions. He might even be capable of primitive abstract reasoning.

Her results were published in leading scientific journals but not everyone accepted her conclusions. It has been argued that her training methods encouraged the parrot to learn short sentences. These gave the impression that he had mastered syntax, when in fact the sentences were just labels, extra-long words, as far as the bird was concerned. It was also possible that he was responding to unconscious clues in the trainer’s posture or intonation; Alex might be another “Clever Hans”.

Clever Hans was a horse that lived in Germany at the end of the 19th Century. His owner, a mathematics teacher named van Osten, taught him arithmetic and German. Hans, it seemed, not only learned to count but mastered multiplication and division. He recognised Prussian kings when shown their portraits and correctly identified pieces of music. Hans communicated with his trainer by nodding and shaking his head and tapping out numerical answers with his foot.

In 1904, the Prussian Academy of Sciences carried out an investigation. In front of an audience, Hans could perform remarkable feats. However, when he could not see people, or when onlookers did not know what questions were being put to him, he failed.

The horse had special skills indeed but they were not arithmetical ones. He excelled at picking up unconscious visual clues from people. As he tapped out the answer to a problem, tension would rise among the spectators. People would hold their breath in expectation and their body-language would change as the correct answer was reached. These told Hans when to stop tapping and get his reward. In Alex’s case however, unconscious gestures are unlikely to explain his behaviour; it took years to teach him to count to six and he never managed the concept of seven. If the teacher’s body-language or intonation were at play, the number to be learned would be immaterial.

Support for Pepperberg’s thesis that birds are brainy comes from another quarter; experiments on ““meta-tool” use by crows at Oxford University. New Caledonian crows will use a long stick to rake in food which is out of reach. If a stick is not long enough, the birds will use a short stick to rake in a longer one and then use that to reach the food. Using one tool to procure or fashion another one is termed “meta-tool” use. Tool-use is fairly common among mammals and birds, but meta-tool abilities are special. The great apes are capable of it but monkeys are not. Crows, therefore, seem to have cognitive abilities equal to those of the great apes and superior to those of monkeys.

If Pepperberg is right, parrots are equally sophisticated. Not only that, if parrots are really mastering basic language, they have the edge on chimpanzees and orang-utans in cognitive research; they are able to talk to researchers.