Excerpt: 'Alex and Me'

Oct. 27, 2008 — -- Irene Pepperberg and an African Grey parrot named Alex worked together for more than 30 years. The pair became pioneers that gave the world insight to animals' minds and intellect.

In her new book, "Alex and Me," Pepperberg describes their relationship, including their massive success, popularity and emotional connection. Read an excerpt below.

Check out more excerpts from the "GMA" library.

I'm not sure who was more nervous in our first days together, Alex or me. I know I was a little on edge, and he sure looked it, the poor traumatized bird. He'd been snatched from what had been his home for many months and thrust into a completely new environment, a small, fairly bare room occupied by a scary parakeet and unfamiliar humans. I considered myself a bird person, but I'd never had such a big bird before, and I was more than a little unsure about how best to handle him. I knew what food and drink to give him. I knew I needed to talk softly and soothingly to him at first, and give him treats. I understood that I had to build his trust in me.

It didn't start well. Alex was still uneasy on the second day, still scared of the parakeet. I decided to move Merlin's cage to another room. I then went back to Alex and tried to encourage him to perch on my arm. He wouldn't even come out of the cage, despite my gentle verbal entreaties. The phone in the adjacent room rang; I went to answer it. By the time I returned to the lab, a minute at most, Alex had climbed out of his cage. Yes! Progress. I offered him some fruit, which he fussed with but didn't eat. I held out my arm for him to perch, and he clumsily climbed onto it. I imagined he had never perched on someone's arm before. More progress.

Not for long. Clearly still alarmed, Alex tried to fly, and promptly crashed to the floor because his wings had been clipped back at the pet store. He was squawking pathetically, flapping his wings wildly. Suddenly there was blood everywhere, spraying this way and that. He had broken a new wing feather. Poor Alex was freaking out, and so was I, but I tried to appear calm so as not to upset him any more than he was already. Having dealt with broken feathers with my parakeets, I knew what to do. But I was facing a very frightened and significantly larger bird here, not a comfortably established pet parakeet. That made it much harder, more hazardous. I eventually managed to gather him up, remove the feather, and get him back into his cage. He was obviously badly shaken. "Alex does not come out more that day, scared of me," I wrote in the journal I started when Alex arrived. Who could blame him?

Over the next few days Alex became a little braver, bit by tiny bit. He started to come out of his cage spontaneously, but was still very wary of me. On the third day he did perch on my hand, by accident: he had tried to avoid me, but found himself perching for a few seconds. I started to give him objects, such as paper and pieces of wood, to explore his preferences. I planned to begin by teaching him labels for things he liked, figuring it would speed up the learning process. It turned out that he loved paper index cards even more than food. He chewed them enthusiastically, rapidly tearing them to shreds.

Day four was even better. Alex again came out of his cage spontaneously and even perched voluntarily for a short time. He continued to enjoy chewing paper. When I gave him some I said things like, "Paper, here's your paper," placing emphasis on the relevant label. My friend Marion Pak, who volunteered to help train Alex, came to meet him for the first time. He immediately took to her, perched easily, and spent an hour seeming quite content with her. And why not? She wasn't the one who had subjected him to torture in a dark box for hours, tossed him on the floor, and broken a feather.

I needed Marion's help with Alex because I was going to use a modified form of a training method I had researched while at Harvard. I'll describe it in more detail later. Essentially, though, the method involves two trainers, rather than the usual one, and they take turns asking each other about an object's label, with Alex observing. Then either one would query Alex, using the same words. The idea was that he would learn in a social context. This procedure was radically different from what would have been considered normal at the time. Marion and I started such training that day, on the label "paper."

After Marion left that morning I stayed with Alex for another hour. I purposely ignored him until he made a noise, then I rewarded him with paper, again saying, "Paper, Alex, here's your paper." Any parrot owner can tell you that their bird may spontaneously learn some random words, but that's not the same as teaching meaningful communication. The first small step in Alex's training was for me to link any novel sound to the single object paper, as Marion and I had done in training earlier. The only vocalization Alex made was something like "Auf," which seemed exploratory, and a rasping, subvocal noise he made randomly. As I gave him one index card I said, "OK, Alex, there's a long way to go, buddy." Alex didn't say anything, just continued shredding paper and wiping his beak. But we had started our work together at last.

It turned out that beginning training with "paper" was an extremely bad choice, because it is very hard to make a "puh" sound if you don't have lips. But Alex himself had made the choice, so we were stuck with it.

During the next four or five weeks I steadily raised the bar for Alex, to push him to achieve more and more. For instance, during training, Marion and I waited for some kind of two-syllable utterance—resembling "pa-per" in rhythm if not in actual sounds—before we would reward him with some paper. That's what is called the "acoustic envelope," the sound shape of the word. We also introduced a silver-colored key to Alex, so that he wouldn't come to associate verbalizing only with paper. He became steadily more vocal and began to produce sounds like "ay-er" when Marion and I asked him "What's this?" when showing him paper, and "ee" for the key. Sometimes he got confused and combined the sounds, like "ee-er." But he was definitely beginning to get it.

Within just a few weeks of beginning training, Alex was indisputably using vocal labels to identify specific objects. He was not merely mimicking, or parroting, us. The first real indication of this happened on July 1. I had seen that he liked to use paper to clean his beak, especially after eating something messy, such as fruit. I'd often give him apple so he'd need paper, which initially he would indicate by some fairly indecipherable vocalizing. That day, however, I gave him apple but forgot about the paper. He was on top of his cage, as usual, and gave me one of those OK, what's the problem, lady? looks that he would hone to perfection over the years. He ambled to the edge of the cage, looked down to where I stored the index cards in a drawer, and said "ay-ah," or something very like that. It certainly wasn't his spontaneous little gravely sound.

A: No!

K: Yes, what is this?

A: Four-corner wood [indistinct].

K: Four, say better.

A: No.

K: Yes!

A: Three … paper.

K: Alex, "four," say "four."

A: No!

K: Come on!

A: No!

Alex was obviously in an especially obdurate mood that day, and was using "no" to express his unwillingness to go along with the training session. (He became even more creative in this respect as he grew older.) It was amusing, unless you happened to be the trainer trying to get some work done. Alex's use of the negative in this way represented a relatively advanced stage of linguistic development.

A few months after this session with Kandis, I had a set-to with Alex that provoked me to write in my journal: "Alex definitely understands NO!" By this time he had developed a passion for corks. On this particular August day he obviously wanted only the best of corks to chew. I gave him a new one. He contentedly proceeded to destroy it for a couple of minutes. When it was about two-thirds gone he dropped it. "Cork," he demanded.

"You have a cork, Alex," I said.

"No!" He picked up the sizeable remnant and tossed it on the floor. If he were human, I would have added that he did it with contempt. "Cork!"

I gave him a cork fragment, again sizeable but not complete. He snatched it from me, tossed it right back at me, and repeated even more urgently and impatiently, "Cork!" He would shut up only when I gave him a new, unblemished cork.

"This happened all morning," I wrote. I had wanted him to learn labels, and to express his wants. I guess I had succeeded.

Even at this early stage in our relationship, Alex was already showing that he was no birdbrain, no matter what the scientific establishment thought.