When he saw himself in a mirror for the first time, he said, “What color?” because he didn’t know the word gray. He didn’t know the word for cake, so when someone brought a birthday cake into the lab and he got to taste it, he called it yummy bread. He combined the words banana and cherry into the word banerry to describe an apple. Pepperberg’s studies of Alex and other parrots proved that intelligence isn’t limited to animals that are similar to us.Īlex had a vocabulary of about 100 words, which is average for a parrot, but instead of just mimicking sounds, he seemed to understand what the words meant. You know, things that humans and apes have, but most animals don’t. They thought an animal needed a specific set of traits to display intelligence, such as a big brain and hands. Back then, scientists didn’t realize parrots and other birds were intelligent. Pepperberg taught Alex to speak and to perform simple tasks to assess his cognitive abilities. Irene Pepperberg bought Alex at a pet shop in 1977 when he was about one year old, not just because she thought parrots were neat and wanted a pet parrot, but because she wanted to study language ability in parrots. One African grey parrot named Alex was famous for his ability to speak. Since the African grey can live to be up to sixty years old, ideally it will be your buddy for basically the rest of your life, but it will require a lot of interaction and care to stay happy and healthy.
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A good breeder will also only sell healthy birds, and will make sure you understand how to properly take care of a parrot. For every wild parrot that’s sold as a pet, probably a dozen died after being taken from the wild. It’s endangered in the wild due to habitat loss, hunting, and capture for sale as pets, so if you want to adopt an African grey parrot, make sure you buy from a reputable parrot breeder who doesn’t buy wild birds. It mates for life and builds its nest in a tree cavity. It mostly eats fruit, seeds, and nuts, but will also eat some insects, snails, flowers, and other plant parts. Like other parrots, it’s a highly social bird. It will also give its treats to other parrots it likes even if it has to go without a treat as a result, and it will share food with other parrots it doesn’t even know.ĭespite all the studies about the African grey in captivity, we don’t know much about it in the wild.
Some studies indicate it may have the same cognitive abilities as a five year old child, including the ability to do simple addition. It’s also one of the most intelligent parrots known. It doesn’t just imitate speech, it imitates various noises it hears too. The African gray parrot is a popular pet because it’s really good at learning how to talk. It has a wingspan of up to 20 inches, or 52 cm, and it has red tail feathers. Specifically it’s from what’s called equatorial Africa, which means it lives in the middle of the continent nearest the equator, in rainforests. The African gray parrot is from Africa, and it’s mostly gray, and it is a parrot. We haven’t talked about very many parrots in previous episodes, even though parrots are awesome. We’ll start with Page’s suggestion, the African gray parrot. Thanks to Page and Viola for the suggestions! This week we’re going to look at two completely unrelated animals, but both are really interesting. The ghost mantis looks not like a ghost but a dead leaf: Where does Empusa fasciata begin and the flower end (photo by Mehmet Karaca)? The conehead mantis is even weirder than “ordinary” mantis species: Nova Science Now: Irene Pepperberg and AlexĪlex: Number Comprehension by a Grey ParrotĪncient mantis-man petroglyph discovered in IranĪlex and Irene Pepperberg (photo taken from the “Why do parrots talk?” article above): This week we’ll learn about a fascinating parrot and some more weird praying mantises! Thanks to Page and Viola for the suggestions!
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