I don’t know too many people with an African Grey in the family who aren’t familiar with the name Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Irene is considered somewhat of an icon in the world of parrots due in part to her work with Alex, her legendary African Grey. Her studies and life with Alex the African Grey were a huge part of my decision to select an African Grey as my species of choice when I got the opportunity to make Parker a part of my family.

I first read about her in a magazine article in about 1984. At the time I was living with my boyfriend Peter, who was a a photographer/science geek. He had a subscription to Scientific American Magazineas well as a curmudgeonly Yellow Naped Amazon that Peter had called Pedro. 

One month the magazine did a story about a young Harvard graduate who was doing studies on the intelligence of African Grey parrots. I was enthralled with what this young woman was doing and that was the last I heard about her work for years. 

Enter Parker about 20 years later. I had brought Parker into my life and was working overtime learning about African Greys and parrots in general: their care, nutritional aspects of their diet and training. Naturally I found tons of information about Alex, the work Irene was had continued with her African Greys and her hopes for what they might achieve. Once again I became fascinated.

Not long after beginning my work at BIRD TALK Magazine, I attended the Houston Parrot Festival.

Irene was a speaker at the Festival and I had the opportunity to meet Irene and have a drink with her. Star-struck? Well yes. A little. This was a woman who’s work I had studied and who’s book and papers I had read. Think Sheldon Cooper meets Stephen Hawking in The Big Bang Theory. But it wasn’t what I thought it would be. Because what you would think we would discuss and what actually came up in conversation were two entirely different things. 

We did have a lot in common. We’re both single, we both practically live in airports,  we both have African Greys and we’re equally short on time. The only difference is that Irene is brilliant and has done phenomenal work in her field. I’m a writer. 

This didn’t seem to make any difference to her when we sat down and began dishing about almost everything. We talked about a myriad of subjects: Current events, airports, hotels, life on the road, the best inexpensive restaurant in Minneapolis and our mothers. We talked about doing laundry in hotel bathroom sinks, dating, the Glass Ceiling and the Women’s Movement. We talked about everything. Well, everything except parrots. Oddly enough they never came up. This was not long after Alex had passed away and I never brought it up because everyone and their dog was giving sending their condolences in the mail and online as well as expressing their sympathy to her at the festival. I thought she had enough of that at that point, so I never broached the subject. 

We email on occasion, run into each other at events and grab dinner or a drink when our paths cross. 

When I emailed her about the possibility of doing this interview, she didn’t hesitate. She responded within a day. I was at Miami Airport when I got her email before jumping on a flight to St. Lucia. She had emailed me from Boston Airport where she was jumping on a flight and flying to Atlanta. She said the interview was perfect to work on during the flight and then described the traffic snarls to Boston Logan Airport the snow storm had caused. I got the picture. I had narrowly avoided getting caught in traffic behind a ten-car pileup on I95 going to Miami that morning. 

So in a sense, this interview began in an email from one airport to yet another airport. And that is how our friendship generally goes. 

I came up with an  interesting way of conducting an interview by not asking any questions. I think the subject can better make use of the interview by forming their own thoughts about what they are thinking rather than leading them directly to an answer that I want. I gave Irene incomplete sentences that she had to complete asked her to finish these sentences in her own words. And as I have found when doing an interview in this unconventional way, I get more than I would by asking direct questions.

Without further delay, my “Finish the Sentence” interview with Dr Irene Pepperberg:

Many people think… that caring for parrots is a very simple task. Actually, they are among the most demanding of the companion animals with whom you can share your life. Their needs are great: For example, constant attention (being a flock animal), loads of terrific fresh foods (a better diet than most of us eat ourselves), lots of exercise (they fly many miles each day in the wild to forage), and good medical care (again, at least the kind of annual check-up that we humans all should have but often skip). I don't mean to say that parrots make bad pets, just that not many people are aware of how much work a parrot can be.

What most people don't understand… is how smart parrots actually are. They have the intelligence of about a 5 or 6 yr old child. And it's not just my work with Alex, Griffin, and the other Grey parrots that demonstrate these capacities....the researchers at the University of Vienna are studying tool use, lock boxes, etc. in keas and cockatoos as well as Greys. By the way...Griffin recently passed the "marshmallow test" (waiting for something better) and we are working on testing his understanding of probability and of various Piagetian tasks.

A typical day with my birds… involves a lot of the same boring stuff done by pet owners (cleaning cages, chopping vegetables, etc.), punctuated with cool training and testing sessions where we examine their intelligence...and just "down time", when they sit on my hand for preening sessions.

I've always tried to …look at the world--and especially the experiments--from my birds' point of view. Literally. How do they see the stimuli? (They see in the ultraviolet, so colors are somewhat different from the way we see them). How might the angle or distance at which we present things affect the results? If I were the parrot, would I understand what I'm being asked to do? What can I do to make the task seem like something the bird would want to do?

It’s all aboutbeing…ethical, getting things right (which is way different from BEING right) …dotting all the “i”s and crossing all the “t”s, and recognizing everyone who has helped. 

The one thing I’ve accomplished that makes me happy is…well, a tough question…but I hope I’ve made the world a bit of a better place.

I’ve changed my mind about…far too many things to describe!

Nothing beats…that moment when one has discovered something absolutely new…when an experiment has worked and the data demonstrate a totally novel finding; that moment when one knows something no one else yet knows but that can change the way that everyone thinks.

I’ve never regretted…the amount of effort I have put into science, although sometimes I wish I had more time to spend with friends and family.

What I’d eventually like to see happen…is that science becomes less of a competitive race and more of a collaborative effort.

Want to know more about Irene and her Greys? You can learn more about Dr. Pepperberg’s work with her Harvard African Greys right here at “The Alex Foundation.”

Dr. Pepperberg’s CV:

Pepperberg  (S.B, MIT, ’69; Ph.D., Harvard, ’76) is a Research Associate and lecturer at Harvard. She has been a visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, a visiting Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and an adjunct Associate Professor at Brandeis University. She received John Simon Guggenheim, Whitehall, Harry Frank Guggenheim, and Radcliffe Fellowships, was an alternate for the Cattell Award for Psychology, won the 2000 Selby Fellowship (Australian Academy of Sciences), the 2005 Frank Beach Award for best paper in comparative psychology, was nominated for the 2000 Weizmann, L'Oreal, and Grawemeyer Awards, the 2001 Quest Award (Animal Behavior Society) and was renominated for the 2001 L'Oreal Award.  In 2013, she won the Clavius Award for research from St. Johns University. She has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation (US).  Her book, The Alex Studies, describing over 20 years of peer-reviewed experiments on Grey parrots, received favorable mention from publications as diverse as the New York Times and Science. Her memoir, Alex & Me, was a New York Times bestseller and won a Christopher Award. She has published over 100 scholarly articles in peer reviewed journals and as book chapters. She is a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the American Ornithologists' Union, AAAS, the Midwestern Psychological Society, the Eastern Psychological Association (where she is now a board member), and presently serves as consulting editor for three journals and as associate editor for The Journal of Comparative Psychology.