“You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”
Like parrots can, he also picked up one-liners from hanging around the lab, like “calm down” and “good morning.” He could express frustration, or apparent boredom, and his cognitive and language skills appeared to be about as competent as those in trained primates…Even up through last week, Alex was working with Pepperberg on compound words and hard-to-pronounce words. As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, she recalled, Alex looked at her and said: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”
Although Alex was well-known as a powerhouse in the small and remarkable set of animals who show some skill with human language, I was struck by how delicately beautiful he was. He had a clean white face, and soft gray feathers in differing shades were scalloped around the white. His tail, in contrast, was an intense red. He measured about 12 inches from beak to tail, and he weighed only one pound. As I watched, Pepperberg offered Alex a piece of a muffin and he accepted it with a “Guuurrrrrrreat!” and then “Yummy.” He called it “banari” (a combination of “banana” and “cherry,” which is his word for “apple” explained Pepperberg). Alex’s voice was distant and tinny, like a recording from an old-style Victrola.
Also see this.
