Alex & Me summary

If you were to sit in on a typical kindergarten class, you would see children learning to identify colors, shapes, sizes and numbers. And if you were to watch Dr. Pepperberg’s research, you might be amazed to witness a group of African Grey Parrots doing the very same thing.

While the methods of teaching parrots and children may be slightly different, it turns out there are many similarities in how they learn and what they’re capable of learning.

So what do Alex’s impressive displays of learning teach us? Well, it’s clear that African Grey Parrots are intelligent thinkers, but Alex has also shown us that these birds can have big personalities.

For example, while learning labels, Alex made it clear that he can sometimes be distressed. Alex had heard the trainers use the word “no” often enough. And in distressing situations, like when he really didn’t feel like participating in a training session, he would sound off with his own loud and clear “No!”

So, we’ve seen Alex display some keen intelligence as well as some surprising emotions and intentions. But he had another surprise up his sleeve. . .

Alex also proved himself capable of being creative by combining concepts to create interesting new ones.

If you were to list all of the animals that share similar characteristics with humans, a parrot is likely to rank a lot lower than a chimpanzee or perhaps even an elephant. Yet, Alex has shown us that we share many similarities with our fine feathered friends.

By learning labels much as humans do, Alex has shown how astute parrots can be at responding to social situations. This means animals can also say things to help navigate their way through the world, receive desired objects and respond to instances of affection, danger or play.

The groundbreaking work that Dr. Pepperberg did with Alex was undeniably fascinating, but also rather unorthodox. As a result, her work has often been labelled as “fringe,” and sometimes even “ridiculous.”

To get published in respected outlets, Dr. Pepperberg had to be rigorous in her testing and documentation in order to get reliable findings and hard, scientific data. So she needed to be precise as to how many times Alex got a label right over the course of hundreds of tests.

Working with a talking parrot is enough of a challenge to getting taken seriously, but being a female scientist meant Dr. Irene Pepperberg had to work even harder to overcome workplace prejudice.

When she was growing up, her mom hated being a housewife and resented having to end her career. So, from a young age, Dr. Pepperberg was committed to overcoming the odds to support herself in the field of science.