This is the Moth Radio Hour, and I'm Katherine Burns. And the tweaking you're hearing right now is my white-bellied kayak Hamilton in my kitchen. He's a small orange, green, and yellow parrot. I love him. But we haven't always had a great relationship. He's more my husband's bird. And when you live in New York City, apartments are small and all pets are family pets. Hamilton is a beautiful bird and he's very friendly.
He likes to lie on his back in the palm of my hand while I rub his belly. He imitates laughter and has learned to tell from the tone of our voice that we're making a joke and laugh along with us. But sometimes we're at odds. Like most birds, he's up with the sun, and sometimes I'd like to sleep in. And when I'm working from home, I often have to explain on a Zoom call, no, that isn't a child screaming, that's my pet.
To give you an idea of how loud he is, here is his daily reaction to my husband Josh putting him back in his cage so he can eat his breakfast. With that in mind, welcome to this week's hour, stories about birds. We're going to hear about encounters with a mischievous raven, scientific adventures with a beloved African gray parrot, and a flock of lesbian chickens. First up, Raven Master Christopher Scaife, live at the Moth. I am one of 37 yeoman warders.
commonly known as beef eaters, that live and work within the ancient fortress, the Tower of London, right in the heart of London. The Tower of London has a great... history but it has some ancient myths and legends and one of the legends tells us that should the ravens leave the tower of london it will crumble into dust and a great harm will befall our kingdom. Now we keep six ravens at the Tower of London by royal decree, just in case.
Derek Coyle was the Raven Master. And he came to me one day and he said, Chris, would you like to join my Raven team? Become one of my assistants. He must have seen me watching the ravens hopping around Tower Green and around the scaffold site and thought that I might have had some interest in them. He said to me, He said, I think the ravens might like you. I thought to myself, why did he call me boy? I was 40 years old at the time.
To be a yeoman warder, you have to have done a minimum of 22 years in the military, be the rank of a warrant officer, and have an exemplary military record. And secondly... How did he know that the ravens would like me? So I was quite curious, and he invited me to go down to the ravens' enclosure one evening. There were two massive ravens inside the enclosure.
Just to give you an example of how big a raven is, it's three and a half times the size of a large crow or the size of a small eagle and just as powerful. And Derek said to me, I'm going to introduce you to the ravens. Get in the cage. And so I did. And I stood there, not really knowing what to do. This large raven, it was massive, it was the size of a harpy, started to move towards me, shuffling its way along its perch. It got closer and closer and closer.
I could see its beady little eyes looking at me. It tilted its head to one side. I could almost feel its breath on my face. Then Derek said, get out. And I did, quite quickly. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, Chris, the Ravens like you. And that is how I became part of the Raven Masters team. He took me under his wing. Derek Coyle taught me everything I know about ravens. He taught me how to clean the enclosure. He taught me how to feed the ravens.
Such delights as mice and rats and chicks. And he taught me how to clean the enclosure. And how to clean the enclosure. And that's really all he really taught me what to do. October the 11th. 2010. It was a cold, crisp autumn morning. I was really excited. It was my first ever raven duty. My alarm went off. I got up, got out of bed.
got myself dressed, made my way out of my little house that just happens to be tucked inside the outer defensive walls of the Tower of London. Yes, I live there. I made my way up a spiral staircase. and onto Tower Green. I stood there for a moment, just absorbing the ambience of the place. I could hear the trees rustling, and in the far distance, a siren went past.
A reminder that I was actually standing in an ancient fortress, but I was sharing London with nine million other souls. I looked up at the White Tower. It was wrapped in scaffolding, canvas. We was doing part of a four-year project of cleaning and repairing it, and this year it was the turn of the western side to be actually cleaned.
In fact, the only part of the western side that could be seen was a weathervane and a large gold crown right at the top of one of the tower's four turrets. However... The workmen had been making a lot of noise, and the clanging of the scaffold poles and the tap, tap, tapping of the stonemason's mallet was disturbing the ravens. So Derek decided that he wanted to move their enclosure. to a quieter area around the tower. So I made my way round to the eastern side to the temporary enclosure.
taught me how to get the ravens up in the morning but to be honest with you I was still a little bit nervous around them. I looked inside the enclosure. I could see Bran. He was a massive male raven. He didn't like humans very much. In fact, he would chase humans, visitors around the tower, on the hunt for something shiny. I once caught him. pinning a small boy to the floor as a young boy was about to put his sandwich in his mouth. That was quite difficult to pass that on to the parents.
Now Bran's partner at the time, a raven called Moonin, she was the oldest and the smartest of the ravens, liked to sleep indoors at night time. We had a little shelter that she would go in. I distinctly remember... Derek saying to me, Chris, do not let out Bran and Moonen. We were doing some experimentation. We were...
doing a minimum wing trim policy. So what we were actually trying to do is allow the ravens to stay at the Tower of London but to allow them more movement around the Tower of London and let them fly a little bit. So Derek said, don't let them out. Got that? Absolutely. I made my way towards the enclosure, unlocked the padlock, went inside very, very cautiously.
Bran, who was sitting on the perch, stuck his head up, looked at me, and with the loudest croak that he could ever make, he sounded off. And I swear to this day, folks, I swear to this day, It was a signal for an ambush. Because just as he done that, Moonin flew out of her little box, struck me on the chest, slid down my body. squeezed through my legs and out of the enclosure. I turned round. I shut the door behind me quickly just to see Moonin starting to get higher and higher and higher.
Derek had not taught me what to do if a raven was to escape. I stood there with my mouth open, like a little bird waiting to be fed. It was terrible. I started to go into a form of paralyzed panic. As I realised that she had started to get higher and higher, she was looping her way around the white tower, the large tower in the centre, and then she disappeared off into the distance.
I spent the remainder of the morning running around, getting the other ravens out, but all the time looking around to see if I could see her on the rooftops and the trees and every corner that I thought she was hiding. But it was to no avail. She had gone. She had flown the roost. I carried on my yeoman water duties for the day. I didn't actually tell anybody that she'd gone missing. I was so embarrassed about it, so I walked around the tower, looking rather dejected.
looking forlornly up at the towers, wondering whether she would come back. I was worried about her. Was she okay? Was she missing Bran? Who knows? It was coming towards the end of the day. We was just starting to usher out the visitors, closing the tower for the evening. And it was about the time when I was going to put the other birds to bed. So I thought I'd have a walk around the tower.
and see if I could take one last look to see where she was. I looked up at the white tower, and I could see, just on top of the gold crown, a small black dot. restrained. Was that a crow? What is a raven? And then I heard her, croaking her sound that she normally made when she wanted to be fed. She had come back! But she was on top of the white tower. And I needed to get her down. I waited till everybody had left the tower. I found...
a staircase that the workmen had been using to carry on their works up the tower, a series of levels that was going right up on the outside of the western side of the tower. I started to climb up them. First level, second, third, fourth, eighth, ninth, tenth level. I pause for a moment. I was absolutely knackered.
I opened this little crack in the canvas and looked outside. It was very, very high. I was looking over London. It was a fantastic view. The sun was setting in the distance. But I wasn't up there for sightseeing. I had to go and save the kingdom. I could just about make out mooning. She was sitting on the golden crown. She was grooming herself, getting herself ready for a night's slumber.
So I decided as I was getting closer to her that I would go into stealth mode. So I started to creep along just as quietly as I possibly could. By this time I was sweating, my uniform was covered in dust, snagging it on the poles. Now, I was about ten foot away from her. Above me was a royal weather vane. A crown. Mooning and the sky. Below me, 150 feet, was the cold, hard earth. This was it.
I climbed up as far as I possibly could. My plan was to grab hold of the weather vane and perhaps have enough strength to lift myself up, grab her feet and bring her down to my chest. I got myself ready. I got myself in position. I grabbed the weather vane. And I made a catastrophic mistake. I had forgot to take into account that a weathervane moves with the whims of the wind. It spun me around in a north-easterly direction.
I remember watching the sky turning around like water going down a whirlpool and mooning flying off into the distance of the setting sun. I felt very stupid. I slid back down onto that platform. I sat there for one moment contemplating life, thinking to myself, what a stupid move to do. I had let down myself. I had let down the tower. I had let down Her Majesty the Queen. But more importantly than that, I had let down Derek and he was going to be absolutely furious with me.
So the climb down the White Tower that day was a long climb down. The following day, I had to explain to Derek that I'd lost one of his prized ravens. She was 19 years old. She'd been with the Tower all that time. He'd cared for her and looked after her. He never spoke to me very much. He just gave me that look. For seven days, I avoided him like the plague. Until one day, one day we got a phone call from a man, a gentleman in Greenwich.
who said that he'd seen a raven in his back garden, and he believed that this raven belonged to a majesty, the queen. He caught it. He'd put some chicken in his back garden, and he'd got a blanket, and he'd thrown it over this raven. He'd gathered up this raven and put it in a bag. And when I raced to his house and got there... This little raven's head was just poking out the bag. A member of the public had saved the kingdom. We brought Moonen back under close arrest.
She spent many, many happy years at the Tower of London, and I learnt a really interesting lesson. I learnt never to trust a raven. Because believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen, they are much more smarter than us. Nowadays, I am the Raven Master at the Tower of London, and I look after our magnificent ravens. We have six there by royal decree, and as the country at the moment is a little bit dodgy, I've got two extra, just in case.
But I do allow the ravens to have some movement around the tower. And as a result of what took place then, and me knowing that she had actually came back to the tower, I now allow the ravens to... all the ravens at the tower of london to be in full flight so if you ever come to the tower of london and you do see the ravens don't just look on the ground anymore look up into the treetops and on the spires and that is where you will find our ravens
Thank you very much indeed. Christopher Scape is the author of The Raven Master, My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London. a book I highly recommend. The night before our London show, I visited the Tower of London with my fellow moth director, Chloe Salmon. It was near closing time, and as thousands of tourists were streaming out of the tower, Chris opened the gate for us and said,
Welcome to my home. We spent the next two hours with him in the now empty tower, watching as he put the ravens to bed at night. Come on, let's go and see the birdies. How long has the uniform been the uniform for? So this one since 1858 and we do have another uniform which is our red ceremonial uniform that can be found on gin bottles, beefy to gin bottles and that dates back to a period of...
King Henry VIII. And King Henry VIII designed it for us. I don't know what he was thinking when he decided to put me in tights and a ruff, but he did. But it's quite uncomfortable. And the reason actually why the uniform changed... to a darker uniform. During the Victorian period there was an awful lot of pollution from the factories around here and it was making our bright red uniforms very stained and they were very expensive and so they changed them to a darker uniform to hide the dirt.
We stood in a small chilly stone room tucked into the tower wall watching him prepare their food. So I'm just defrosting some lamb tarts and that's their dinner for tomorrow. I'm just gonna feed this one, these two chicks in a minute. We'll go round the back and see from the other side as well, where the public don't actually go. So the two over there is Erin and Rocky. Them two there is Grip and Harris.
the little monkey in there is bobby and that one is jubilee two because jubilee one was kept by a fox which was a bit embarrassing Chris explained why there's a large pile of gloves sitting next to the Raven's enclosure. This is a collection at the moment of Poppy's gloves that she steals from people. Oh my gosh.
It's just loads and loads of gloves around. He gave me a now-treasured gift, a feather that had fallen out of one of the ravens that day. Sometimes I give a primary and a secondary feather. And the primary and second throw is they work together in flight. And one gives the bird strength and the other one gives it maneuver. And I sometimes give them I'm such a sentimental person.
Two people who are about to get married so that they have to stay together for life. They're incredibly intelligent. They're one of the smartest birds in the world. There have been scientists around the country and around the world actually that suggest that ravens are feathered apes. There are suggestions that ravens are as clever as primates.
The reason why the Ravens were actually probably brought into the Tower of London was during the period of the 1880s there was an execution site that needed to be memorialised. Queen Victoria said that she wanted us to commemorate those who lost their lives here.
and we were going through a period of gothic revivalism and as a result of that people like Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens were making ravens quite fashionable and ravens have been associated with death and they're dying for a long long period.
of time throughout history and so what better way to encourage visitors into the Tower of London than to trim up a few birds flight feathers, ravens flight feathers, stand them around the execution site and say look these are the lost souls of the dearly departed. And that's a brilliant bit of marketing by the tower. To see photos and videos of Chris snuggling with his ravens, go to themoth.org.
Coming up, a woman in Detroit decides to raise chickens in her backyard. And things go afoul. That's when the Moth Radio Hour continues. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath.
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That's Nutrafol.com, promo code THEMOTH. This is The Moth Radio Hour, and I'm Katherine Burns. In this show, we're hearing all about birds. And our next story was recorded at the Alabama Shakespeare in Montgomery, where we partner with Troy Public Radio. Here's Dame Wilburn, live at the Moth. So my wife is an organic water kind of person, like free range, organic, fair trade, small batch.
Single owner, you know, whatever the buzzwords are, whatever we buy has to cover all of those things. She likes to hike. She likes to fish. She comes from what we call the thumb. you know because we're a mitten so she comes from the thumb area in michigan and i will admit it was a bit of a jerk move when i moved her from that forest to detroit now
So, you know, when you're married, you get into a lot of conversation. So her first conversation with me was that she's like, I really don't know if I can live here because there's no grocery stores. And I said, there are plenty of grocery stores. They just sell socks.
And then she said, well, I need a grocery store that sells groceries and not socks. And I said, well, then, you know, this might have been a mistake. So then she said, well... what I really want is fresh eggs and I said oh that's no problem they have eggs where they keep the socks and she said but that's not those aren't fresh eggs and so we got into this
long conversation really about socks because we're married and we ventured off but you know how when you've been married a long time they loop back the men in here know what i'm talking about your wife would just loop back on you like we this was three weeks ago and all of a sudden we're back at this again so she looped back on me and said um
Yeah, I think I have a solution for the fresh egg problem. I said, well, I love to hear that. And she said, I think we should raise chickens. And I said, okay, so, okay. Now, I need you to help me with this chicken thing because if you want me to hunt somebody down, if you want me to pull somebody to the side and have a...
personal and private conversation with them. If you want me to burn down a house and collect the insurance money, I'm a Detroiter. These are skills I have. Okay? I don't know how this chicken thing works. And she says, well, you get a bunch of chickens and you feed them and then you eat the eggs. I'm like, okay, I did go to a private school. I got that part. But how do we get the chickens? I mean, do we go to the grocery store and buy eggs and wait? Like, what do we do?
And she said, no, you can go to a farmer and pick them up as chicks and then bring them home. And for whatever reason, I said, okay. Now, I think the real reason was secretly I wanted to raise my own chickens and stick it to the man. That was my secret theory so we go to this farmer to get these chickens now my wife went on she did a lot of research which means she went on Wikipedia
And she used the Google. So the Google and Wikipedia told her there's all kinds of chickens, and I didn't know this. There's chickens that are good for laying eggs. There's chickens that make delicious soup. There's chickens that are so pretty you don't touch them. I didn't even know that. So she says to me, what we're going to get is Buff Orpingtons. And I love that name because it sounds like a frat guy, right? Hi, I'm Buff Orpington. You know, and I love it. I love that.
You know, you want to see my mom's Mercedes? No. So we find a farmer in Belleville, Michigan, which is about... Most people who have never been to Michigan don't understand, okay, it's Detroit and it's a city, but you're probably 15 to 20 minutes away from farmland at any given minute. So we get outside the city and we get these birds. Now, we're at...
The farmers. And our idea is to get five chickens. Pretty sure we don't know what we're doing. We're expecting three to just die. Just because we don't know what we're doing. So we figure we're going to kill three in general. And that'll leave us with two, and two's enough. So we get there, and we're picking out these chicks, and they're these cute little blonde chicks. And they're making these peeping sounds, and they're so cute.
But I have this moment because I was raised in Detroit in the 70s and 80s when it mattered. And I am, you know, power to the people, my people. Black is beautiful. So I'm looking at these. I'm like, I'm not raising all these. white birds in my backyard in Detroit. That seems insane. So I look in these chicks and they have black chicks. I didn't know there were black chickens. I didn't know. So I see this little black chick and I'm like, yeah.
We can get them little blonde chicks if you want to, but we're going to get one black chick, yeah. Right? So the farmer gives us five buff Orpingtons and a Plymouth Barred Rock. Now it's time to outfit their... Warm space. So for those of you who don't know now I've got to buy heating lamps I'm buying heating lamps and my wife is building all this weird construction in the middle of the living room and we're buying organic feed and it's costing
Lots of money. And I'm unprepared to be a farmer because I showed up at the tractor supply company in a Honda Element. The guy at the cash register looked at me, looked at my car and said, what are y'all doing? And I said, we are raising chickens, sir. So we get them home, and we get them all set up, and the only people who are really interested in the chickens are the cats. The cats are like, ooh, look, Meals on Wheels.
And once we calmed them down, we are now chicken parents. Now, it took a minute for them to stop looking like... brooms that nobody had cleaned and it started actually being birds. So we finally moved them outside and my wife builds them a chicken coop. Another way that you know that we're unprepared to be chicken farmers is that my wife built their coop out of butcher block.
from ikea their entire coop was built from the scrap section at ikea their house was better than the house we were living in so They're outside, and there's a couple things that I don't know if you know, so I'm going to share them. Number one, chickens lay one egg a day, six days, and then they cycle. They take a day off. Now, that's fine unless you have...
Six chickens. And I don't know about you, but you can't give the eggs to the neighbors because the neighbors go from, oh, thank you for the eggs. Yo, where's my eggs in like a week? And no one wants to deal with that. So we are now eating eggs with everything. I'm eating hard-boiled eggs like Oreos. People are coming to the house and it's like, would you like a cup of tea and possibly an egg?
Would you like a piece of pizza? Here's your pizza and an egg like we're we are eating more eggs that we could shake a stick at Now that egg thing it was easily a problem, but then the birds became little too much to handle and the day we knew they were too much to handle turned out to be a Sunday now I wake up to this sound And I say to my wife, what the hell was that? Here's something else they don't teach you on the Wikipedia. Chickens are natural lesbians.
If there's no rooster around, one of them will butch up on you. So I look out into the backyard, and on top of the Ikea chicken coop, who's up there crowing at the sun? That sister I bought. The Buff Orpingtons are pew, pew, pew, just having their own chicken time. And that girl is up there, just trying to bring the party. And that's when I looked at my wife and said, we got to get rid of them.
We can't we can't keep them now my wife was concerned that we were going to somehow get arrested or get a ticket and I informed her that we were in Detroit in the Detroit Police Department had a bigger fish to fry that Like, we didn't make the list of the things the Detroit Police Department had on their plate. But she was still concerned, and Natasha wasn't getting quieter. So I found a woman.
north of the city who had her own flock of chickens. And we moved them. Here's another thing you need to know. It's easier to move chickens when they're asleep. We didn't do that. I just found it was easier. Six fully awake chickens in a dog kennel and the back of an element going down the road. That was easily a mistake. But we get to this woman's farm and we release our chickens.
into her flock. So a couple of things that we noticed. Number one, our chickens were huge because my wife let them eat whatever they wanted. Also, our chickens were a little weird because my wife had decided that since they didn't have a mother, she would teach them how to scratch the ground and dig up worms.
And the way they scratched the ground looked a lot like the way my wife scratched the ground, but nothing at all the way a chicken scratches the ground. So we dropped them off, and about two days later, the woman who has the flock calls us and says, what is the deal with these birds and we said well whatever do you mean and she said when i go for coffee in the morning they come up on the porch and sit with me
I said, well, they used to do that with my wife while she was teaching them how to scratch for worms. And the lady just hung up on me. Thank you. Dame Wilburn is a storyteller and artist. After honing her storytelling abilities by attending the Detroit Waldorf School for 10 years,
and spending summers on the front porch of her grandparents' home in Macon, Georgia, Dame went on to be a Moth Grand Slam champion and frequent Moth mainstage storyteller and host. During the pandemic, Dame and her wife became chicken owners once again.
To see a photo of Dame and one of her newest chickens, waffles, go to themoth.org. While there, you can call our pitch line and leave us a two-minute version of a story you'd like to tell. Do you have a story about a bird or a cat or another animal? please call us up and tell us about it. The number to call is 877-799-MOTH, or you can pitch us your own story at themoth.org. A scientist recounts her life with a very special parrot named Alex. That's when the Moth Radio Hour continues.
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns. Up next, the last in this hour of bird stories. It was recorded more than 10 years ago in New York. Here's Irene Pepperberg live at the mall. So it's 1970s, and I'm getting my doctorate in theoretical chemistry from Harvard.
And I'm watching NOVA programs on this groundbreaking work on training animals to communicate with humans, work on signing chimps and dolphin studies. And I decide, that's it. I've had this epiphany. I'm going to change my whole field and do this work. and I'm going to do it with a parrot. And parrots talk. They live for a long time. I thought this was the most incredible idea in the world, that I'd be part of this revolution.
I finish the degree. I study up everything I can in the field. I write my grant proposal. I submit it thinking yes and no. The reviewers come back asking me what I'm smoking. The last time parrots and humans were connected, unlike apes, where we're connected pretty closely genetically, 280 million years ago. Big, big difference.
Parrots, unlike dolphins, they have this little tiny brain the size of a shelled walnut. You know, dolphins have this big brain. It makes sense to work with them. Not with a parrot. Plus, I'm working with an animal that's a pet.
You know, I mean, how am I going to keep my scientific objectivity there? And plus, I'm not going to use the standard scientific techniques of the day, which means starve your animal to 80% of its normal body weight, stick it in a Skinner box and go from there. No, no, I'm going to just... talk to the bird.
Yeah, right. But I'm really determined. I go out and I buy a parrot. It's a gray parrot. That's the name of the species and the color. He's a gray. Different shades of gray. Bright red tail. It's about this big. Weighs about a pound. I name him Alex. learning experiment and so I start training him by giving it modeling system he's learning a couple labels and I
put in the grant proposal. And this time I'm really lucky. I have somebody on the panel who studies bird song, who recognizes the striking parallels between the development of vocal communication in birds and humans. So I get a grant for a year, and it was quite a a roller coaster of a life. But at the beginning, we started this work. And in Alex's first 10 years, he learned about 50 labels for objects. He learned to label seven colors. He learned to label five shapes.
two, three, four, five, and six cornered. He labeled different materials. He understood concepts. So I could show him the object. And I'd say, Alex, you know, what's this? And he'd say, block. And I said, good birdie. And what color? Blue. Good boy. And what shape? Four corner. And what matter? Wood.
And he combined these labels so he could identify 150 different things. This is a parrot, brain size of shell walnut. Could label about 150 different things. He learned concepts of bigger and smaller. So I could show him two things and say, what's color bigger, what color smaller? And he'd tell me. He learned, and this was really extraordinary, a concept of same and different.
So I could show him two things and not just tell me that they were same or different, but he could tell me what about them was same or different. So I'd say, what's same? And he'd tell me color, shape, matter, or none, if nothing were same or different. And this was pretty exciting work. And again, Alex is about 10 years old, and I'm invited to the International Primatological Congress. This is a big...
Deal. International Congress. I'm speaking in front of a thousand people, and I'm the only person there who is not a primatologist. I am the one person who has been invited to talk on comparative behavior. And I'm talking about a bird again, brain size of shelled walnut to all these people who are working with apes and orangutans and whatever. So I get up and I give my talk.
And at the end of my talk, we call them the silverback males. One of the senior primatologists gets up, and I'm going, okay, here it comes. I'm just going to get... totally creamed. And he, you know, well, you know, very interesting little study you did there. But you mean to tell me that your bird did something much more complicated than premax apes?
And I want to say, yeah, I'm backwards and in heels, you know, to be honest. But I say no, and I smile. I say, no, sir, you know, that's right, sir, he did. And I'm thinking, okay. And he says, oh, and he sits down. And I'm going, oh.
I've done it. I've made it, you know? Yay. But a couple of weeks earlier, I had gotten this little letter from the National Science Foundation saying, you know what? It was a nice proposal, but we ran out of money, so no more funding. So I'm sitting there going, okay, how are we going to keep...
the lap going at this point. So we fast forward a little bit and it was still very hard for me to get some recognition from colleagues even with these successes. There was always the question of scientific objectivity and I dealt with it by treating like a colleague. And the way I would treat my students, you know, you work with them, you teach them as much as you can, you respect them.
But you draw a line between the way you interact with them and the way you interact with your own children or the way you interact with your significant others to keep that scientific objectivity. You know, we're doing okay. And again, by this time, we're doing a lot of publicity. We're doing Scientific American Frontiers and Discovery Channel and 48 Hours. And Alex is about 15, and we get an invitation to do radio from the BBC.
And by this time, Alex's personality is really coming to a fore because he's learned not just to answer questions, but to label and to interact and ask me questions. And so now I'm thinking, radio? You know, I could ask him anything, and I could say, yes, good boy, because, you know, they can't see what's going on. So I think, all right, how am I going to do this? Okay.
So I start the program, and I say, okay, I'm holding an orange square piece of wood, and I'm going to ask Alex some questions. So you hear my heels, click, click, click, as I go into the room, and I go, Alex, going to ask you some questions, going to do some work. And I go, Alex, what color? A little birdie voice, no, you tell me, what shape? Okay, Alex, it's four-corner now. Can you tell me what color? Tell me what matter. Okay, Alex, it's wood. Can you tell me what color? No, how many?
Alex, there's one toy here. And part of me, again, is going, oh, this is so cool. He's not just acting like a little robot. I mean, he's interacting with me. He's talking with me. The other part of me is going, but they really want to hear him answer some questions.
So I'm going, Alex, come on, what color? And he goes, no, tell me what shape. And I go, OK, Alex, time out. You're misbehaving. And you hear my heels as I start to walk out the door, giving him a time out. And then comes a little birdie voice. I'm sorry. Come here. Orange. So obviously, I treated Alex like a colleague, but he didn't necessarily treat me like a colleague. We got a gig at the Media Lab at MIT. Big time. I'm hired for a temporary position.
that could be extended to use the bird as a model for intelligent learning systems. But once I'm there and I start looking at all the gizmos and whatever they have, I start developing for the sponsors... Animal-human communication systems to enrich the birds' lives, all these animals. InterPet Explorer, web browsers for parrots, things like that.
And those of you who know the Media Lab know that the sponsors come, who've given us all this money to do these things, come twice a year to see what we've done with their money. Well, word had gotten out that there was a live bird. And they wanted to see Alex. And they come through in waves five to seven minutes.
What we were doing was showing him refrigerator letters, the things you show your kids to have him sound out the letters in the hope that somewhere down the road he'd be able to, like, we could put the letters together and he could maybe sound out a label.
to see if he understood what these sounds meant. Okay, so, but he's at this very early stage, and the task at this point, we put all the letters on a tray, they're different colors, and then, you know, we ask, Alex, what color is, you know, and he goes, blue. Good birdie. What a nut. Okay, Alex, you can't have a nut. We've only got these people for five minutes. You know, let's do another thing, okay? You know, what sound is green? Shh. S-H. Good birdie. What a nut.
Wait, wait. So we do this several times, and each time he's getting more and more upset because he's not getting his reward. And finally, after about four or five times, he looks at me and goes, what nut? Nuh, uh, tuh. In typical Alex, he's telling me stupid, do I have to spell it for you? But the other part of it is, you know, I'm thinking he's gone light years ahead of us because n and t were on the tray.
But ah was not. So he had figured out himself how to split the words apart into the sounds and use them. So again, after all of these high points, the Media Lab gig falls apart. I'm actually on unemployment for a while. I get a Radcliffe Fellowship to help things through. But to keep the lab going, I'm going to bird clubs every other weekend.
literally to raise money. I have to raise $100,000 a year to keep the lab going. And it's getting more and more crazy, and we're trying to figure out what's going on. And my colleagues at Harvard have this great idea. that Alex has been so interactive and fun, maybe we should start looking at how he sees the world, literally. Can he do optical illusions? So we put together a grant, and of course it's rejected the first time, we fix it up, we resubmit it.
And it's September 2000, 2001. A little bit later that week, I'm sitting at my desk eating breakfast, which I do. Emails are coming in from Europe and Japan. And one comes in from Europe. ITalk has been funded. Yay, okay. It's a big European consortium, millions of euros coming through for this. I'm a consultant. No real money, but they send me to Europe once a year to use Alex as a model for intelligent learning systems. And I'm thinking, again, yes, justification of our work.
We're on an upswing. I'm so excited. Get a second cup of coffee, sit down, and there's another email with the tag sad news from the head vet at Brandeis where the birds are. And I open this email. But it's not exactly about attack, except that one found a dead parrot in the back left-hand corner of the room. And I freeze. And I'm going, this is not true. It can't be. I mean, this is a nightmare, right? I'm going to wake up.
But I call Brandeis and know Alex has passed in the night. And I go into complete shock because this is a bird. He's now 30 years old. We're supposed to have another 20 years here. And I can't believe it. Obviously, I'm not functioning. I kept a diary, but it's hard to even talk about it now. So over the weekend, friends come up. They drive from Washington to be there with me to make sure I'm fed, to roll me into bed so I won't sleep, but to get some rest.
Other friends locally are taking care of me too. My board of directors from the foundation sets up an obituary because I can't, I mean, I'm just totally out of it. I'm like walking into walls. And Monday morning comes, and I call the Brandeis PR folks, the folks I've been working with for all these years, because every time Alex had done something cool, the media would pick up on it.
And we do some interviews. So I call them, and Laura, my friend there, says, Irene, I'll put this out, but, you know, this is a bird. I mean, it's not going to get any traction, but I'll put it out. I say, fine, whatever. And by the time I drive the 40 minutes from my house to Brandeis, my cell phone is ringing off the hook. My lab manager's cell phone is ringing off the hook. The lab's phone is ringing off the hook. We're being asked for interviews all over the world. And I'm...
Interview mode I can handle. I've done this for years. Pick up phone, close eyes, answer questions as they come. hang up phone, take the next interview, fine, that I can deal with. And I'm doing this for a week. Meanwhile, emails are pouring in, 3,000 to my own account. Boxes and boxes of letters are coming from people all over the world. Alex gets three articles in the New York Times, an obituary in The Economist. I mean, you know.
Yeah. And I'm still in total shock. It's just nothing's coming through. And finally, I get this big box of letters, but there's a little box inside. And I open it up, and it's from... grade school class. And the week before Alex died, the teacher had brought her gray parent into classroom to teach them about animal intelligence and conservation issues. And when the kids learned about Alex's death, they said they all wanted to write sympathy notes. So they all drew pictures of Alex.
and then little notes to me. And I'm opening one of these and it's from a little boy and he says, I know how you feel. My grandma died this summer and someday your heart will heal. And that's when... All these barriers that I had put up to keep Alex on the other side of my emotions so I could do the science, it came through that there wasn't going to be any more science. Alex was gone. And all these emotions broke through, and I realized I had lost the most important being in my life. Thank you.
Irene Pepperberg is the president of the Alex Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to avian intelligence and conservation. She's been a research associate and lecturer at Harvard, where she studied the cognitive abilities of gray parrots. She has published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals and is the author of the book The Alex Studies and Alex and Me.
To see photos of Irene and Alex, as well as a video of my parrot, Hamilton, accidentally doing a front roll off our bed, go to themoth.org. Hey Hamilton, the bird hour is over. You want to say goodbye? That's it for this episode. So we hope you'll join us next time. And that's the bird story from the moth. Your host for this hour was The Moth's artistic director, Catherine Burns, who also directed the stories in the show.
The rest of the Moth's directorial staff include Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jeunesse, Jennifer Hickson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Emily Couch and Chloe Salmon. Special thanks to Kyle Gassett, Carolyn Hutchison, and Rick Dildine. Mall Stories Are True is remembered and affirmed by the storytellers, our theme music, by The Drift, other music in this hour from Blue Dot Sessions, Stellwagen Symphonette, Lewis Harden, Moondog, Carla Kilstead and Dan Rathburn.
The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.