I have a friend who is into birds. I mean, really, really into birds, and also a pretty smart guy, and he told me something that blew my mind, although I can’t find a cite for it. His claim is this:
There is a parrot somewhere (Australia?) that can produce English. It will say things like “I flied to kitchen”–what’s interesting is that “flied” is a misunderstanding of grammatical rules, similar to what a small child would do. The implication is that this bird can understand grammatical rules on a primitive level.
Such a bird would be an enormous boon to science and our understanding of language, but there’s one catch–the bird’s owner thinks it is psychic.
Has anyone heard this story? It sounds outlandish, but like I said he’s generally a smart person, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt and doing research.
ETA: It’s a really stupid article though that’s sounds really daffy, the research project is a lot more credible than that moronic artice made it sound. Wiki has an entry about him too. There is still quite a debate about whethre or not he was truly creating new sentences or mimicking oddly.
I have a talking budgie - not the same thing as an African grey, but close enough in terms of the topic. He mimics quite a range of phrases that he has picked up from things we’ve deliberately taught him and other things he’s overheard us saying.
He does repeat whole phrases, but he also likes to mix up words, syllables and sounds pretty much ad lib - sometimes this is just a complete stream of nonsense, and sometimes it happens to sound like an intelligible, but novel sentence. Those occasions are definitely more memorable than all the others, so yes, I reckon confirmation bias could easily be a factor.
They are intelligent birds though, so they will use sounds in context - if I say “hickory dickory dock”, my bird will reply “the mouse ran up the clock” - of course he doesn’t know what a mouse is, or a clock, but he knows that certain sounds fit with certain situations. He’ll also say “ouch!” when he’s planning to nip me, “hello” when someone goes to see him, and “C’mere” when he leaves his cage to fly to me.
What’s happening here isn’t exactly the same as the sort of complex linguistic processes that an adult human does, but I do think it’s more than just mechanical repetition - perhaps something like when a human baby can point at a few things and name them.
But there certainly is a capability for logic - on a few occasions when I kept taking him out of the cage to pet him and he was tired, he has flown back in and tried to shut the door - these are more than just mindless automatons - they’re not little feathery men either, but they are people, kind of.
I don’t think a true conversation with a parrot, using proper language symbols and logic, is inconcievable - so maybe this is it.
I got really excited about N’kisi a year or two ago, then very disappointed.
If you look at the site of the owners of N’kisi, they immediately undermine any credibility they may have by banging on about parrot telepathy:
So we’re stepping from “an amazingly verbose parrot that may or may not be using linguistic fragments in an intelligent fashion”, to “an amazingly verbose parrot that may or may not be using linguistic fragments in an intelligent fashion and is inter-species telepathic”.
In my opinion, there’s confirmation bias coming out of the wazoos of the observers, and therefore, in the words of an angry Duncan Bannatyne, “I’m out”.
Our African Grey says things in context to real-time events. For example, if you drop something on the kitchen floor, she says “uh-oh”. If the phone rings, she says “hello?” If you turn off the light, she says “nighty-night”. Is this normal for this species? Or do we have a particularly uber-smart specimen?
I would think you would know all about talking animals, since you are named after a talking chimp!
The things you mention are actually exactly the kind of things that African Greys are good at. The one we had would say hello when the phone rang, or if you put the phone up to his face, and he would say goodbye if he saw you putting your coat on.
My favorite was when he would see our cat get up on the couch, he would yell “get off!” He had been my mother-in-law’s bird, and she didn’t allow the dogs on the couch, so she would say 'get off" if they snuck up there. The bird never did understand that our house had different rules!
They are also really good at learning names of people, if they live with them long enough. Our bird knew my husband’s name (I think they got the bird when my husband was pretty little), but he never learned mine, even though he was with us for 8 years.
As far as Alex goes, he wasn’t a hoax at all, but he was unusually smart. I doubt we ever could have gotten our bird to understand language as well as he did. On the other hand, no one worked with our bird 8 hours a day from infancy, either, so who knows?
It sounds normal for many parrot species. One of our previous budgies (also a great mimic) lived in a cage next to a door with a squeaky hinge - one day, I decided I’d had enough and I oiled it, but when I opened and closed the door to test it, I could still hear the squeak - every time, right on cue, coming from the budgie.
I know it can be argued that these are simple mechanical stimulus/response things, but I believe there’s more to it than that, for a number of reasons, including that there seems to be evidence that birds capable of mimicry are also able to imagine a sound in their heads without actually making a noise
A friend of mine had a number of talking birds. She had an African Gray that would tell on the other birds when they did something wrong. He would also threaten punishment. The standard was a quick spray from a spray bottle. When the Gray was trying to go to sleep and the others were makinging noise, he’d yell “Squirt!”
The latest thing I taught my budgie to say is: “HELLO!? Hello Mr Polly Parrot! Hello Polly! I’ve got a nice fresh cuttlefish for you when you wake up!”
Once, when Alex was left at the vet overnight, he was scared and called to his trainer:
Hey! Come here!
I love you!
I’m sorry!
I want to go back!
It is like some sort of sad haiku. Very haunting.
In any case, in Alex’s case researchers seems to have ruled out the Clever Hans effect. He knew how to and when to apologize and could answer questions to any questioner even with his trainers elsewhere. It would seem there is more to the intelligence of birds than we have hitherto suspected.
Then why are they so quick to attack at the slightest provocation? A few months ago, I was spending some quality time with our AG, feeding her pistachios—her fave. She ate about 7 or 8 in succession without any sign of distress. Then I made the mistake of accidentally concealing the nut with my thumb as I was passing it to her. She freaked and bit down hard—it felt just like hitting my thumb with a hammer. It also left a bruise that took several weeks to heal. If they’re so damned smart, why are they afraid of their own shadow? And even more to the point, what on earth could possibly possess them to literally bite the hand that’s feeding them?
Thing is, they don’t really get that you, or your hand, isn’t just another bird - so they act in a way that would be appropriate if it was - in this case, another bird would probably have responded with some submissive signal that would have curtailed the bite really fast.
My bird nips my lips quite painfully if I stop talking to him - I’ve noticed the birds in aviary flocks nipping and tugging at each others’ beaks in exactly the same way - of course it doesn’t hurt each other when they do that, only when they try it on a human, who doesn’t have the beak.
