[flying Elvis]

A friend of mine was installing his satellite dish last year. He was outside on a ladder adjusting according to the rise and fall of the tone from his tv. (you know where this is going.lol) No matter how much he tried, he couldn't get it right. He'd think he was in the right position only to hear the tone change, signalling to him that it was in the wrong position. He finally became frustrated, gave up, and walked into the house to discover that his parrot had learned the pitch and had been giving him false signals for the last two hours.

[abigailsmybaby]

Friends of ours own several parrots and cockatoos. They mvoed into a house in the country and promptly built an aviary in the back yard. One of their neighbors had a bell on the outside of his house to alert him if his phone rang while he wass in the back yard (I'm sure you know where this is going...:)). That poor guy wore himself out that first week after his new neighbors moved in. Of course his bell no longer serves it purpose.

[Ichneumon]

He finally became frustrated, gave up, and walked into the house to discover that his parrot had learned the pitch and had been giving him false signals for the last two hours.

It took us a long time, but we *finally* learned to hear the difference between our phone ringing and our African Grey parrot doing a pitch-perfect rendition of it.

African Grey's are amazing -- while most large parrots can learn to speak and have surprisingly large vocabularies, most talk with that stereotypical "parrot" voice. But African Grey's 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.