"Alex & Me": story of a remarkable bird and the woman who loved him

"Alex & Me"

by Irene Pepperberg

HarperCollins, 232 pp., $23.95

Scientist Irene Pepperberg was about to board a plane for Tucson, Ariz., when a peevish reservations clerk refused to let her on with a bird cage. No matter that her avian companion, "Alex Pepperberg," the famous African Grey parrot, had his own ticket — and the papers to prove he was a valuable research subject and TV celebrity.

"And I suppose you ordered him a meal?" the agent sniped, after being overruled by a supervisor.

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I did," Pepperberg said without missing a beat. "He's getting the fruit plate."

That 1990 anecdote is one of many choice moments in the new memoir "Alex & Me," Pepperberg's fascinating and often humorous chronicle of a three-decade collaboration — and deepening bond — between bird and scientist. It ended last year with Alex's death at 31.

Pepperberg's groundbreaking research on two-way communication between parrots and humans would transform the pejorative "bird brain" from a catcall into a compliment.

Alex eventually mastered more than 100 English words and learned to count, recognize shapes and colors and identify materials like wool, wood and paper. Before he died, he and Pepperberg began working on his perception of optical illusions, which, it turned out, was much like that of the human brain.

"Alex & Me" treads some familiar territory. The professor — who teaches animal cognition at Harvard University and works out of a laboratory at Brandeis University — published her academic work, "The Alex Studies," in 2000. Media reports on Alex abound: Perhaps nothing's more convincing, though, than watching Alex do his stuff for Alan Alda on the TV series "Scientific American Frontiers." (Clips are available on YouTube.)

Lonely girl

Pepperberg's memoir enriches our understanding of her commitment to her research with revealing tidbits about her own life, starting with a lonely childhood where her best friend was a dime-store parakeet called "No Name."

Like Alex, Pepperberg was a chronic overachiever. She was just 16 when she headed off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with her latest pet parakeet. After graduating, she earned her Ph.D. in chemistry at Harvard. But she found herself more compelled by the nascent, and controversial, field of animal communication.

Encouraged by the work done with dolphins and apes, bird-lover Pepperberg chose African Grey parrots for her research because of their intelligence and clear speech. The baby bird she named Alex — an acronym for Avian Language Experiment — was chosen at random from a cage in a pet shop.

In the 1970s, she struggled for respect and research grants, ignoring the skeptics who derided animal-intelligence studies as no more than circus tricks. Even when the grants came in and acceptance grew, money remained tight: She subsisted on tofu and kept the thermostat low.

As Pepperberg frequently reminds us, Alex had a brain the size of a shelled walnut. His remarkable learning took place through the time-consuming but highly effective model-rival method, involving two trainers. One person posed questions to the other, rewarding correct responses; then they switched roles.

Alex wasn't always the model pupil. He chewed up telephone cables and Pepperberg's research proposal. When he grew really bored, he teased his testers by giving the wrong answers — on purpose.

Pepperberg struggled to maintain her professional distance and scientific objectivity. She called Alex a "colleague" yet clearly cared for him.

"I Love You"

On a September night in 2007, Pepperberg put Alex and her two other African Greys back in their cages for the night.

Following their ritual, Alex told her, "You be good. I love you," and she answered, " I love you, too."

"You'll be in tomorrow?" asked Alex.

"Yes," said Pepperberg. "I'll be in tomorrow."

When Alex was found dead in his cage the next morning, Pepperberg's grief was overwhelming. Friends comforted her; strangers from all over the world sent condolences.

"Alex left us as a magician might exit the stage: a blinding flash, a cloud of smoke, and the weaver of wizardry is gone, leaving us awe-struck at what we'd seen, and wondering what other secrets remained hidden," she reflects in her final chapter.

Pepperberg continues her research with her other African Greys, but she reminds us Alex will always be special: "Alex taught us how little we know about animal minds and how much more there is to discover."