African Greys are amazing -- while most large parrots can learn to speak and have surprisingly large vocabularies, most talk with that stereotypical "parrot" voice. But African Greys are perfect mimics -- you'd swear they were feathered tape recorders. They can not only reproduce people's specific voices so well that they can fool the person's spouse, but they can do amazingly accurate renditions of almost any other sound as well, like dogs barking, cats meowing, door hinges sqeaking, phones ringing, videogame sounds, dog toy squeakers, power tools, knocking on doors (wood or metal), the distinctive sound of a squirt bottle... The list is endless.
Furthermore, as lab research subjects they have indicated clear ability to count, categorize by shape/color/material/arrangement, answer and ask specific questions, and so on: "THAT DAMN BIRD" A Talk with Dr. Irene Pepperberg.
LOL -- while looking up links for this post, I ran across a page with this anecdote about Alex, the original research subject:
A parrot after my own heart
Last Sunday, I spent a beautiful fall afternoon walking around Valley Forge National Historical Park with my seven-year-old son Mac and Dick Oehrle, whom I've known since we were undergraduates together.
Dick's daughter once worked as a research assistent for Irene Pepperberg at the University of Arizona. Dick relayed this story about the language skills of Alex the African Grey Parrot.
It seems that Cheerios cereal was a favorite treat among the parrots in the lab. At a certain point, someone went to a new local health food store, and brought back some healthy organic O-shaped whole-grain cereal. Alex tried a mouthful, spit it out, looked at the provider, and said, very distinctly:
"Wood."
Of course, what you're reading is my re-telling of Dick's re-telling of his daughter's story, which itself might have been second hand. But still.
The only nutritionally sufficient cereal was Cheerios; some of the granolas had to be discontinued midway through because the rats were dying of malnutrition.