HENRY

Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker talks about “the woman behind the world’s chattiest Parrots”, Irene Pepperberg:

As the crowd at the Midwest Bird Expo waited for the cognitive scientist Irene Pepperberg to take the podium, the hum of human chatter was punctuated by the sound of parrots whooping it up—twittering and letting loose with wolf whistles, along with the occasional full-out jungle squawk. The birds, many of them for sale, were displayed in cages just beyond the curtained-off stage, which was inside the main hall of the DuPage County Fairgrounds, in Wheaton, Illinois. Nobody seemed particularly distracted by the commotion. …

Here were admirers who had sent in ten-dollar bills to help support her research with Alex, the African gray parrot that she worked with for thirty years; and here were people who, after Alex died, unexpectedly, of heart arrhythmia, on September 6, 2007, helped form an online community that comes together on the sixth day of every month to reflect about him.

Posted on June 5th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill