Einstein of parrots was a feather in researcher's cap

WALTHAM, Mass. -- Griffin seems depressed. He's less talkative than usual and has lost some interest in learning. Given the death of his roommate, it might not take a psychologist to diagnose depression. Except Griffin, who lives in a psychology-department lab at Brandeis University, is an African gray parrot.

Griffin's trainer, scientist Irene Pepperberg, balks at applying the label "depression" to a bird. But she says she is not feeling so good herself.

"Where do we go from here?" she asks, referring to the loss of Alex, the rock star of the parrot world who dominated her lab and her life for 30 years. Alex died unexpectedly in September of a heart arrhythmia.

Alex could identify colors and objects, such as "rock," "wood" and "wool." He could identify "bigger" vs. "smaller" and knew a triangle as a "three-corner" and a square as a "four-corner." He could say how many objects were a particular color and shape ("how many green blocks?") as well saying "none" when a set of items was not present. When trainers worked with his labmates Griffin and Arthur, he sometimes interfered — answering for them, telling them to "say better" or posing a different question about the items.

Because parrots have the rare ability to mimic human speech, Pepperberg says, their spoken responses on intelligence tests can give researchers insight into how bird brains function. Other researchers worry, however, that the very use of human-language terms may cause researchers to infuse the birds' speech with too much human meaning.

A longtime collaborator, biologist Russell Balda of Northern Arizona University, calls Pepperberg's work groundbreaking. "She's shown the higher-level abilities of parrots to not only figure out complex relationships but also express them in human terms."

But after Alex's death, many investigators still don't know what to make of him. Was he an avian Einstein, or could many birds have the same abilities?

Alex's second language

Pepperberg started her career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and moved on to Harvard University, where she earned a doctorate in theoretical chemistry in 1976. She owned budgies, a kind of parrot, as a child and had one in high school that seemed bright to her. After seeing TV shows about singing birds and chimps that used sign language, she decided to do intelligence research on parrots by teaching them human speech and then asking them questions. She got Alex the year after she earned her doctorate.