Black Dot Diary

Four years ago an alien arrived in my liv­ing room. It was grey with big black eyes, scaly feet and feath­ers. It spoke Eng­lish and could bite, hard. It also said “I love you” and would run around the house scream­ing “Help” if it was time for a bath.

This alien is a 21-​year-​old African Grey Par­rot named Ben­nie. She came for a hol­i­day and never left. Since she arrived in our house, she has become a much-​loved mem­ber of our fam­ily. I could not imag­ine life with­out Ben, and that’s good because she could pos­si­bly live for another 45 years.

Before Ben­nie, I was afraid of birds, enough to make me hide under the bed cov­ers when a spar­row acci­den­tally flew into our house. But Ben­nie has a way of win­ning hearts and it wasn’t long before she won mine, even though I later dis­cov­ered the cute dance she liked to do for me was actu­ally a mat­ing dance! (A side note: Peo­ple won­der why Ben­nie has a guy’s name. The truth is, Ben­nie spent most of her life as a guy until she was ‘sexed” and found to be female.)

Ben­nie is amaz­ingly smart. She doesn’t just imi­tate — she com­mu­ni­cates with intent and with mean­ing. Just ask our dog. Ben­nie has appointed her­self the boss of the dog. She tells the dog to “sit down and shut up” and “git”. I have walked into our liv­ing room to find the dog cow­er­ing at the foot of Bennie’s stand as the bossy bird berates her: “You bad dog, what are you doing? Lie down, you bad dog.” Where does she get this from? We don’t talk to our dog like that!

She can call every­one in our fam­ily by name, except for the cats. To Ben­nie, every cat is called “Shadow.” Once I was dri­ving to work with Ben­nie in her cage beside me in the pas­sen­ger seat. About five miles from home, a cat ran in front of our car. “Shadow!” Ben­nie called. “Uh oh.”

When Ben­nie is cold she says “Brrr” and when she is happy she con­grat­u­lates her­self by say­ing, “Good girl, Goo Goo Ben.” We don’t know why she says Goo Goo, per­haps as an abbre­vi­a­tion for Good. She loves jokes. When she trips or drops some­thing, she says, “Shit!” and laughs and laughs.

One of Bennie’s best moments took place when we were watch­ing Lord of the Rings on video. When Aragorn leans in to kiss the elf princess, Ben­nie piped up, “I love you. I love you,” she said, adding in a flurry of kiss­ing sounds.

She def­i­nitely likes love not war. When voices are raised or guns are fir­ing on TV, Ben­nie often yells, “You shut up, you bad.”

Smarty Pants

African Grey par­rots are widely known to be amongst the most intel­li­gent ani­mal species. This has been con­firmed by sci­en­tific tests, most notably by Dr. Irene Pep­per­berg and the African Grey she worked with for 30 years named Alex.

Dr. Pep­per­berg and Alex demon­strated that African Greys have the abil­ity “to asso­ciate human words with mean­ings, and to intel­li­gently apply the abstract con­cepts of shape, color, num­ber, zero-​sense, etc (Wikipedia).”

Sadly, Alex died pre­ma­turely on Sep­tem­ber 6, 2007 at age 31. His last words to Dr. Pep­per­berg were, “You be good. I love you.” I am reminded of a time two and half years ago when our old Golden Retriever Sandy was dying of can­cer. She was lying on a blan­ket on the floor and it was clear she had only a few hours left. Ben­nie watched qui­etly for a long time from her perch atop her cage. Then she climbed down onto the floor, walked over to Sandy and made a sor­row­ful sound as she bowed her head. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Ben­nie knew exactly what she was doing. She was say­ing good­bye to her friend. She didn’t make a sound for about two days after Sandy died.

Accord­ing to Dr. Pep­per­berg, African Greys per­form many cog­ni­tive tasks at the level of dol­phins, chimps and tod­dlers. “[Alex] pos­sessed more than 100 vocal labels for dif­fer­ent objects, actions, col­ors and could iden­tify cer­tain objects by their par­tic­u­lar mate­r­ial,” accord­ing to The Alex Foun­da­tion.

“He could count object sets up to the total num­ber six and was work­ing on seven and eight. Alex exhib­ited math skills that were con­sid­ered advanced in ani­mal intel­li­gence, devel­op­ing his own “zero-​like” con­cept in addi­tion to being able to infer the con­nec­tion between writ­ten numer­als, objects sets, and the vocal­iza­tion of the num­ber. Alex was learn­ing to read the sounds of var­i­ous let­ters and had a con­cept of phonemes, the sounds that make up words.”

You can learn more about Alex and Dr. Pepperberg’s work in the book Alex & Me. The book gave me more insight into the remark­able minds of African Greys and inspired me to work harder at mak­ing life inter­est­ing for Ben. It sad­dens me to think of how many par­rots are put in cages and ignored, or turfed out to pet stores because own­ers won­der why their birds are act­ing “bad.”

African Greys need as much love, atten­tion and enter­tain­ment as human tod­dlers. And when they receive what they need, they are very giv­ing, lov­ing birds with great senses of humour. They can also get you into trou­ble. One night, we had some friends over for din­ner. The wine flowed until well past Bennie’s 8 p.m. bed­time, which she is reli­gious about unless there is some­thing good on TV. As our friends lin­gered over good­byes near the door, I heard Ben­nie begin­ning to rus­tle around in her blanket-​covered cage. I heard her sigh and click. As one of our friends kept talk­ing, it was finally too much for poor Ben­nie. “Blah, blah, blah,” Ben­nie yelled out. “Good night.”

Ben­nie likes to yell at the yappy poo­dles next door. “Shut up,” she’ll holler in a deep, autho­r­a­tive voice. “You shut up.” I finally had to tell my neigh­bour that it was my bird, not me, who was yelling at her dogs.

Some­times I do feel a bit like Dr. Doolit­tle. While Ben can occa­sion­ally be irri­tat­ing (espe­cially when she beeps like the oven timer for the 40^th time) she is, on the whole, pretty pleas­ant being to have around. As I write this, Ben­nie is cov­ered up for the night but she’s still talk­ing: “Whatcha doin’?” she asked in a voice that sounds like Bobby Kennedy. “Good night. I love you. Good­night, Goo Goo Ben.”

(Thanks to Chris Holt for the pho­tos of Bennie)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.