Irene Pepperberg and Alex

Greetings everyone!

So yesterday, I witnessed something truly amazing on the WOSU. The program on NOVA ScienceNow started out talking about somebody named Alex. My first thoughts were: Who is Alex? And why do people keep on referring to him only by his first name? As the program went on, one interviewee compared Alex to Albert Einstein and another compared his death to the King of Pop’s death; however she felt more emotional attached to Alex. I immediately thought to myself, “Why had I not heard of Alex, especially if his death was being compared to one of my all-time favorite artists?” 

Well, my lack of knowledge regarding Alex was perhaps due to  me being focused on my school work and the absence of Alex on the type of programming I often watched. Alex was a well-known parrot, who was taught to speak and increase his animal intelligence by Irene Pepperberg.  Irene conducted a study on Alex, which displayed that animals could be taught to communicate with people.  Her inspiration came from watching a TV program where a man taught a chimpanzee how to communicate through sign language. After seeing such a wonderful thing take place, Irene changed her major from Chemistry to Biology and enrolled at Purdue. She set out to do the same thing that she had seen on T.V.; train an animal how to communicate with others.  Though Irene did not get very much buy-in during the beginning phases, she did not let that deter her from her study. 

Within 30 years of Irene working with Alex, she was able to teach him colors, shapes, sizes and how to explain to others what he wanted.  She defied the odds and helped man communicate with parrots. You could say that she is the Dr. Dolittle of parrots; she taught Alex over 100 words, provided a strategy on teaching parrots to communicate and continues to teacher other parrots today.

Thanks Irene for your continued dedication and seeing the possibilities in the often peculiar!