Bird Brain

Call him Alex - just Alex. This celebrity goes by one name. Personal assistants swirl around his perch, offering him water, a massage, a toy. He eats only vegan food, of course, breakfasting on broccoli cooked for him by his personal chef. Japanese film crews want to shoot him. Visiting scholars want to watch him at work. Alex the parrot lives in a room at Brandeis University's Foster Biomedical Research Lab, where a team of grad students, a.k.a. "parrot slaves," caters to his every whim.

It's not his looks that got him here: An African gray, Alex is covered in feathers the color of a sweatsuit. Rather, Alex has made it as far as a parrot can go in academia by proving himself to be exceptionally smart, or at least better educated than just about any bird on the planet. Irene Pepperberg, an adjunct professor of psychology at Brandeis, has been training Alex for 27 years (he's 28), using a unique method she calls the model/rival technique. Alex watches interactions between his trainer and another parrot or a human being, learns to answer questions correctly, and competes to show he knows the right answer - it's something like being a contestant on a parrot version of Jeopardy! The technique works, dazzlingly. In the 1980s, Alex made headlines for being able to identify objects by shape, name, and color with an 80 percent or better accuracy rate.

Since then, Pepperberg has taught Alex the rudiments of spelling, addition, and subtraction. She will publish a paper this year in which she argues that Alex can understand a simple form of the concept of zero. Because of his sophisticated ability to communicate, Alex gives us a new window into the mind of a bird. In fact, Pepperberg is now working with two researchers to compare Alex's performance to that of young children. The bird's walnut-sized brain, which evolved along a different evolutionary path than our own, may turn out to function in remarkably similar ways.

I came across Alex in a video on the Web. "Tell me what's different," a woman asks him from off-screen, as she waves two keys in front of his beak. "Color," he says, correctly, in his littlegirl voice. (The video can be seen at www.alexfoundation.org/alextheparrot.mov.) It was the voice that got me, an impossibly sweet whisper that reminded me of the loyal (and fictional) dolphin in The Day of the Dolphin, who coos "Fa loves Pa" to its trainer and then swims off, ostensibly to its death; my eyes had welled with tears even as I cursed myself for being manipulated by a stupid dolphin movie.

In real life, Alex turns out to be nothing like the vulnerable naif I had imagined. I find him squatting on a perch with his beak tucked into his neck, glaring at me with a half-hooded eye. Bits of feather, like aimless snowflakes, float in the air. Two other parrots - Griffin and Arthur, a.k.a. Wart - are mellowing out on their own perches. Pepperberg, a woman with a dramatic sweep of dark hair, sits in a chair nearby. She begins fussing with Griffin's perch, lowering it on its adjustablestand. "Alex has to sit as high or higher than the other birds," she explains. Of course - top billing.

"Want nut," Alex snaps.

Pepperberg decides this means he's ready to work. She arranges six blue, four red, and two yellow blocks randomly on a tray. "What color two?" she asks, proffering the tray under his beak.

Alex bobs his head this way and that, gazing at the blocks suspiciously. Pepperberg repeats the question a couple of times. Alex seems to space out. Finally, he whispers, "Yellow."

"Good boy," she says.

Alex has performed feats such as this one correctly over and over, allowing Pepperberg to argue that he can recognize quantities from one to six. But he has also thrown some hissy fits in between his star turns, and it was during one that he made his most recent breakthrough. When Alex refused to cooperate one day, Pepperberg tried something new. "OK, Alex, tell me, what color five?" she asked, holding before him a tray with a set of two, three, and six colored objects on it - but no set of five.

"None," Alex shot back.

Alex knew the word from other contexts. However, he had never been taught to find a word for an empty space, a zero. Pepperberg believes he improvised the answer. In a series of trials, Alex continued to use "none" over and over again, correctly, to mean zero. Today, Pepperberg considers putting Alex through his "none" paces for me but decides he's too cranky. Alex, in fact, is winding himself up into a four-star, Hollywood huff.

"Want cork," he squawks. Pepperberg offers him a piece of the best cork a parrot could ask for - $75-a-bag sterilized primo that won't infect sensitive beaks. Alex chomps down on it, enjoying its gumlike texture. But in a matter of seconds, the cork goes flying across the room.

"Want cork!" he bleats. Pepperberg sighs and fetches it.

"Want cork! Want cork!"

Throughout the visit, Alex continues to spit out the cork, and Pepperberg tirelessly retrieves it. "Hold it with your foot, Alex," she says at one point, but otherwise exhibits the profound patience of a woman who has been training parrots for decades.

In her academic article, to be published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology in June, one paragraph reveals just how frustrating it must be to study parrot intelligence year in and year out. "Alex completely balked during testing for approximately two weeks," she reports. "He would, for example, stare at the ceiling, reply with a color or object label not on the tray, fixate on that label, and repeat it endlessly, interspersed with requests to return to his cage."

Whether Alex understands nothingness is still up for question. But he clearly knows how to act like a star.

Pagan Kennedy's most recent book is Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo.