When the great Austrian entomologist Von Frisch proved beyond all doubt that bees use language, an entomologist at the University of California expressed "passionate reluctance" to accept the evidence. Why the emotional reaction? Because in much of the academic and scientific community it is a point of honor, a rubric of ritual, and a requirement of intellectual etiquette that one abstain from saying anything that might remind one's colleagues of religion, mysticism, magic, or the supernatural - or anything to suggest that forms of life other than human are truly intelligent. Up to a point this is a healthy attitude with which I am not arguing, except to remind such academicians of their overly heavy emotional investment in maintaining it. - Alan Watts, 1972.
Konrad Lorenz, a famous Austrian expert on animal behaviour, had a particular attachment to his birds. In his famous mid-twentieth century experiments on greylag geese, he investigated how newly hatched birds “imprint” on their mothers - or what they took to be their mothers. Lorenz took advantage of their instinctive behaviour by hatching goslings in his presence. He would walk around his property quacking, with his little charges following him in a row behind. Lorenz once told of waddling around quacking in his backyard, and looked up to see his neighbours staring at him aghast. He then realized that the grass was too high for them to see his goslings - not that an explanation would have helped much.
An amusing story, but ethologists and other scientists in Lorenz’ time held some rather primitive ideas. They believed babies couldn’t feel pain, and were convinced animals were nothing more than machines dispensing a limited mix of instinctive behaviour and conditioned responses. The feathered, finned and furred were simply Darwin’s wind-up toys. With the possible but grudging exception of cetaceans and the higher apes, scientists didn’t believe animals were capable of complex intelligence or finer human emotions like love.
Yet in the past few decades, research by ethologists has toppled human self-definitions of the old-school patriarchal variety. Homo sapiens (Man the Thinker)? Nope, even bees can do arithmetic of sorts and recognize individual human faces. Homo faber (Man the Maker)? Nope, crows can make compound tools out of multiple parts. Homo ludens (Man the Player)? Nuh uh. Crows also like tobogganing.
Boid
Of all birds, parrots demonstrate astounding levels of intelligence, as anyone who owns one knows. Personally, I have fond memories of a white cockatoo named Boid, who once belonged to my sister and her late husband when they lived in Seattle.
There wasn’t much to Boid physically. He loved to have his head and neck scratched, and when I ran my fingers under his feathers he felt like a strip of beef jerky. Most of his volume was in feathers and brains, it seemed. My sister referred to him as a “chicken with a PhD.”
This clever fellow had a crest that rose when he was alerted or surprised, and a beak that was always on the job. He'd gnaw on glasses, rings, shirt buttons, zippers, drawstrings, epaulettes, or any object on your person that he thought -- or he wanted you to think he thought - was detachable, including ears. As far as Boid was concerned I was just a gigantic, bespectacled chew-toy.
Boid's upgraded, overclocked birdbrain enabled him to dissemble as skillfully as any politician. The conniving cockatoo knew when he was being bad, but would affect an air of stupidity that was only transparent when I got to know him better. I stopped wearing a cableknit sweater in his company after he invented a gambit I called, “Gosh, My Claws Are Stuck." When I attempted to pluck him off me to return him to his cage - a fate he dreaded - he would engage his claws in the loose fabric to make it seem like he was tangled up, while looking away in feigned ignorance.
So there was some serious “theory of mind” going on there.
Shades of Konrad Lorenz
My sister and her husband clipped Boid’s wings to keep him from flying. But they stopped at one point so his wings would grow out and he could fly indoors. One day while he was still a piloting novice, Boid escaped out the front door. At that point he knew how to gain altitude, but not how to glide; so he went from shrub to sapling to treetop, getting higher each time. As my sister observed at the time, "it was like watching a thousand dollar bill fly outside and up into the trees." She ran out, flapping her arms - which she did at home when encouraging Boid to fly indoors - trying to get him to come down.
Boid was up about a hundred feet up in the trees at this point, a pale white dot just barely visible from the street. The neighbours only saw one part of the picture: my sister, running down the street flapping her arms, crying “look at me, look at me!” like a demented Tippi Hendren from The Birds.
Just before Boid fluttered ungracefully back down, someone standing on the sidewalk - perhaps dimmer than your average bird - saw my sister flapping away and asked, "Didja lose your dog, lady?"
Tuco
Boid seemed to enjoy being naughty, a habit of high intelligence shared with other parrot species. Consider this anecdote by Salt Spring Island author Brian Brett about his African grey parrot:
“Tuco...arrived with attitude and never lost it. One night, we were in the television room, and Tuco was on his television-watching perch with his popcorn bowl, when Tara, our first Labrador, wandered in. I could see the gears going around in Tuco's head. From the way he was eyeing the dog, it was soon apparent that mayhem was being planned. He grabbed a piece of popcorn and flung it toward Tara, who caught it in mid-air. A few more popcorn tosses in this game and he had the dog directly beneath his perch. That's when I twigged and yelled: "Tuco, don't do it!" But Tuco was definitely doing it, and he was too quick to stop. He's always been faster than me. Now that he had the dog in close enough range, he whipped around, lifted his tail, and shat on Tara, directly between the eyes. It was an impressive splat, and the aghast dog ran out of the room. We had to catch up with her and wipe the shit off with a paper towel, while Tuco cackled on his perch, raising one claw triumphantly, as he does when he's having a howler.”
African Grey parrots are marvelous mimics, of course. “He is a master at faking mechanical sounds,” Brett writes in his engaging memoir. “He can also do a perfect microwave. What's more interesting is that not only are we unable to distinguish his beep from the microwave, but he also has the minute timer down pat. And his ding will start a split second before the actual ding of the microwave.”
Alex
Alex was the famous African grey parrot meticulously studied for years by psychologist Irene Pepperberg. He had a vocabulary of more than 100 words and knew the names of fifty objects, seven colours and five shapes, using them combinatorially in the correct context. He also grasped concept like “present” and “absent” and picked up many functional phrases, like “I'm gonna go now,” which he learned from when people left the laboratory.
Pepperberg describes how, when Alex is scolded, “We say, ‘No! Bad boy!’ We walk out. And he knows what to say contextually, applicably. He brings us back in by saying, ‘Come here! I'm sorry!’” Alex learned to say he was sorry by hearing humans say it. He knows when to say it. Does he feel regret? ‘He bites, he says, ‘I'm sorry’ and he bites again, says Pepperberg, somewhat irritably. “There's no contrition!” Just like many people.
- When Animals Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy
I hope this doesn’t make parrots sound like feathered arseholes. To be fair to them, this is behaviour in captivity. Perhaps their high intelligence comes bundled with a perverse sense of humour, particularly when they’re taken from the wild. Complex brains likely go that route out of sheer boredom, and parrots can be a handful to put it mildly.
(One anecdote I recall reading about Alex - and can no longer source - involved Pepperberg’s accountant, who spent one day doing the books in the room where Alex resided. Alex asked her, “wanna nut?” The bookkeeper answered, “no.” Then Alex responded, “wanna grape?” and the bookkeeper replied, “No Alex, I don’t want a grape.” This repeated a few times until finally Alex said, “Well, what do you want?”)
Reading the accounts of parrots’ skills and tricks, one wonders what their limits might be.
N'kisi
After Oxford-trained biologist Rupert Sheldrake published his book Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home in 1999, he received more than a thousand additional accounts of pets demonstrating supposed psychic talents.
“Some of the most surprising of these concerned parrots. I heard over and over again about parrots that responded to their people's moods, feelings, and intentions by making appropriate comments. In some cases this ability seemed to be telepathic,” Sheldrake wrote in his followup 2003 book, The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind.
Aimée Morgana, an artist living in New York City, had read of Sheldrake’s research into telepathy by animals. Convinced her own parrot was capable of reading not just her and her husband’s moods, but their actual thoughts, she decided to reach out to the author.
Sheldrake learned that Aimée’s African Grey, N'kisi (pronounced "in-key-see"), had mastered a vocabulary of around 700 words by January 2002, at the age of four years old, putting Alex to shame.
Aimée taught N'kisi to use language as if he were a human child. He has learned the contextual meanings of words, and is able to use his understanding of language to make relevant comments. He speaks in sentences, of which Aimée Morgana has now recorded more than 7,000 different ones.
Here is Sheldrake’s account of Morgana’s first messages to him about N’Kisi:
"N'kisi regularly comments when we are thinking about eating, going out, or taking a shower, even if we are sitting quietly in another room and he sees no body language and hears no audio cues. At these times he will say, for example, 'You want some yummy,' 'You gotta go out, see ya later,' or 'You wanna take a shower.' "
"I was thinking of calling Rob, and picked up the phone to do so, and N'kisi said, 'Hi, Rob,' as I had the phone in my hand and was moving toward the Rolodex to look up his number.
"We were watching the end credits of a Jackie Chan movie, edited to a musical soundtrack. There was an image of [Chan] lying on his back on a girder way up on a tall skyscraper. It was scary due to the height, and N'kisi said, 'Don't fall down.' Then the movie cut to a commercial with a musical soundtrack, and as an image of a car appeared, N'kisi said, "There's my car." (N'kisi's cage was at the other end of the room, and behind the TV. He could not see the screen, and there were no sources of reflection.)
The skeptic would reasonably put this down to chance and the owners’ need to anthropomorphize their pet into a prophet. Besides, data is not the plural of anecdote. Certainly “Talking psychic parrot” sounds more like a Monty Python routine than a respectable scientific hypothesis, but being a scientist, Sheldrake decided to travel to New York to investigate N’kisi independently.
I’ll say no more about the results, other than offer this little-watched Youtube video from the early aughts:
Telepathy of any kind is a huge claim, particularly in animals. But we’d do well to it remember it wasn’t that long ago that scientists were convinced animals were incapable of either thinking or feeling in a way remotely comparable to humans, and that talking parrots could only mechanically “parrot,” with no understanding of the words. What now-dismissed faculties will establishment scientists recognize as real, in animals and humans alike, decades from now?
That said, parrots and other bird species hardly require the mantle of telepathy to be astoundingly sentient beings, whose dynamic with their captors ranges from strange and sweet to frustrating and tragic to joyous. For too long, the hairless ape has thought of the others - the finned, the furred, and the feathered - as the Other.
Enjoyed this very much, Had me laughing throughout. Very funny!
Very interesting!