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Bird Brain, But in a Good Way

By Lee Ostaszewski

I hate to bring everyone down with bad news, but I have something to share if you haven’t already heard. This one is hard to take. Still, as tough as it is for us; imagine how sad a day it was for members of the scientific community when word got around that one of the great contributors to scientific research of all time, Alex the Parrot, unexpectedly died.

I think the headline used by MSNBC summed it up best, “Gifted research parrot Alex found dead.”

That’s right, not only was Alex a research parrot, but a gifted one as well. How gifted, you ask? Well, among the parrot community, Alex was like Einstein, only with more feathers and no accent. Not only could Alex, an African gray parrot, count to six, recognize shapes and colors, and identify more than 50 different objects - putting him well ahead of Paris Hilton - but he was an accomplished accordion player as well.

OK, I made the accordion player part up. But that doesn’t lessen the heartwarming feeling one gets after hearing his story and realizing that during Alex’s lifetime, and he lived to be 31, that this amazing bird probably applied for, and received, more federal research grant money than you or I ever will.

Actually, Alex’s lab were he lived and worked was located right here in Massachusetts at Brandeis University. He worked alongside psychology researcher Irene Pepperberg who, technically speaking, was the one who purchased Alex 30 years ago, trained him, and used him to help understand the avian brain. But Pepperberg didn’t see Alex as a research subject. As she told The Daily News Tribune, “He was my colleague.”

According to the Tribune story Pepperberg has two younger parrots, Griffin, 12, and Arthur, 8, in the lab that are currently in the early stages of being trained. She thinks they might someday prove to be as bright as Alex.

While I’m not suggesting they were jealous of Alex’s success, I’ve watched enough cop shows to know that should Alex’s death be ruled foul play (get it?) authorities need to look closely at these two parrots as possible suspects. I’m not saying Griffin and Arthur had anything to do with Alex’s mysterious death, I’m only pointing out

that they had motive.

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding Alex’s demise, the important point is that his life helped show us that birds, despite popular belief, are not as stupid as we generally assume they are. And certainly not as stupid as, say, the woodpecker that kept attacking the gutter on my house last spring.

Perhaps some other avian brain researcher at some other university has a woodpecker speaking Latin and doing algebra, but the particular woodpecker banging on my house had the approximate IQ level of shaving cream.

For two weeks the bird would spend long hours every day sitting on the gutter rapping it’s beak against it, sending a loud, metallic sound reverberating throughout the house as if someone was jack hammering through the roof.

Now, in the animal kingdom, banging your head repeatedly against any hard object for whatever reason is usually a sign of low intelligence. I don’t care if that is how the woodpecker evolved. If so, then it’s a case of stupid evolution. Just because something works and is extremely successful doesn’t mean it can’t also be dumb. Paris Hilton is a perfect example.

Anyway, my sons, Kevin and Chris, where on the computer together one morning the first time they heard the woodpecker attacking our gutter and they were both startled. Kevin ran out of the room thinking the furnace was exploding, but Chris said later that he thought it was just Kevin, ummm, you know, “letting one rip” so to speak.

This is why when we are in public now and one of us accidentally “releases steam” in a highly audible fashion, I’ll look around innocently and remark, “Oh, I think I hear the woodpecker.”

Kevin and Chris usually laugh at this; my wife, Beth, not so much. Just because evolution has brought the male to a point where we universally enjoy a good joke about embarrassing bodily noises, any woman will tell you that it’s still really immature.

Yet, I bet you if Alex were alive, being a guy parrot and all, he would have fallen off his perch laughing so hard. ■