Alex

Alex_the_Parrot

 

“You be good,” said Alex. “I love you.”

 

Alex, who found a home at Brandeis University, also claimed a perch on some of the more exclusive real estate in print: the obituary page of the Economist. “Science’s best known parrot,” they called him. Today my 6th graders read another one of his many obituaries.

Lest this sound like a belated April Fools joke, let me assure you that Alex was a real, and indeed rare, bird. He had the intelligence of a (human) five-year-old and a vocabulary of over one hundred words. According to his Wikipedia entry, “[h]e was the first and only non-human animal to have ever asked an existential question.” His death at age thirty-one was especially tragic: the typical African Grey parrot’s lifespan is twice that.

We read Alex’s obituary on the final day of the new state English tests, which take 225 minutes over three days. I expect my students have his sympathy: “After repeating some learning trials dozens of times, Alex would become tired and throw objects off the trays with his beak.”