Alex's Shadow

Parrots are very intelligent (African Greys, in particular), and often live longer than people, so it's no surprise they might have some of the same issues people do with death:

Griffin seems depressed. He's less talkative than usual and has lost some interest in learning. Given the death of his roommate, it might not take a psychologist to diagnose depression. Except Griffin, who lives in a psychology-department lab at Brandeis University, is an African gray parrot.

Griffin's trainer, scientist Irene Pepperberg, balks at applying the label "depression" to a bird. But she says she is not feeling so good herself.

"Where do we go from here?" she asks, referring to the loss of Alex, the rock star of the parrot world who dominated her lab and her life for 30 years. Alex died unexpectedly in September of a heart arrhythmia.

Alex could identify colors and objects, such as "rock," "wood" and "wool." He could identify "bigger" vs. "smaller" and knew a triangle as a "three-corner" and a square as a "four-corner." He could say how many objects were a particular color and shape ("how many green blocks?") as well saying "none" when a set of items was not present. When trainers worked with his labmates Griffin and Arthur, he sometimes interfered — answering for them, telling them to "say better" or posing a different question about the items.