Alex is dead. The 30-year-old African gray parrot was a resident of Irene Pepperberg's lab at Brandeis University, and for decades Pepperberg taught Alex elements of English. As a result, he had the language capabilities of a two-year-old and the cognitive capacity of an older child. The famous bird was filmed by camera crews from all over the world, he appeared in stories in major newspapers, Pepperberg wrote a book about him, and he was featured on Scientific American Frontiers ("He loved Alan Alda," said Pepperberg).
While doing research about language evolution, I visited Pepperberg and Alex last year. Although Alex was well-known as a powerhouse in the small and remarkable set of animals who show some skill with human language, I was struck by how delicately beautiful he was. He had a clean white face, and soft gray feathers in differing shades were scalloped around the white. His tail, in contrast, was an intense red. He measured about 12 inches from beak to tail, and he weighed only one pound. As I watched, Pepperberg offered Alex a piece of a muffin and he accepted it with a "Guuurrrrrrreat!" and then "Yummy." He called it "banari" (a combination of "banana" and "cherry," which is his word for "apple" explained Pepperberg). Alex's voice was distant and tinny, like a recording from an old-style Victrola.
Because he had lived all over the country with Pepperberg, Alex's "carrot" sounded Midwestern, while his "shower" was Bostonian. He could identify by word 50 different objects, seven colors, and five shapes. He comprehended numbers under 10 (though he didn't count sequentially) and he could make distinctions between things that are the same and things that are different. Once he learned new words, Pepperberg tested him on them. She would fill a tray with blocks, maybe four green and two blue, and then ask him, "How many blue?"
Alex's talents showed that the ability to understand categories like color and shape and number is not only not specific to humans, it's not special to apes, or even to mammals. Alex could use these categories to understand complicated labels, and in the larger meaning created by stringing some of these labels together, like "What color five?" His skill in comprehending and using these concepts was much greater than was once thought possible. Humans may have words for these concepts, but Alex showed that you don't have to have language as we do in order to understand them or to be able to act on that understanding.
One of Alex's most recent accomplishments was learning to transfer his concept of "none" from a same-different study to numbers. "Folks have studied the concept of zero in chimpanzees, but never in birds," Pepperberg explained. None is considered a particularly sophisticated concept even for humans. "What I'm finding," she said, "is that Alex can use none without training, to refer to an absence of quantity in some situations. So, if I give him a tray of two blue, four green, and six yellow blocks and ask 'What color five block?' he'll say, 'none.' What's most surprising about the fact that Alex understands what 'none' means is that he was trained to use 'none' when asked what was the same between a set of objects when in fact nothing was the same. (He was also trained to use 'none' when asked what was different between a set of objects when nothing was actually different.) Alex spontaneously used none to denote the absence of difference in size between a pair of objects, and then also spontaneously transferred it to the 'What color?' task. I had a tray and was asking, 'What color four?' and he kept saying 'Five.' I was pretty frustrated, and without thinking I finally said, 'Okay, what color five?' to which he replied, 'None.'"
I looked on as Pepperberg sat Alex near her desk and showed him various trays of blocks. She got him to identify the colors and amounts. Then she put the testing aside and tried to teach him the color white, which was a new category. She held a square piece of paper up to him and asked, "What shape?" "Corners," said Alex. "Yes, it has corners," she said. "What color?" As he did with every other object she proffered, Alex beaked the paper with interest. He stalled for a few minutes, then said, "None." Pepperberg burst out laughing. "Okay, fair enough," she said. "In your world, this has no color."
The Alex Foundation announced Friday that Alex had unexpectedly died. Donations can be made at the site.