The sweet soul of Simon the African Parrot
There’s a small pond just beyond the back porch of my wife’s condominium in the San Francisco Bay Area.
All kinds of creatures live there, but water fowl rule the roost.
When the windows are open, I can hear the caw of resident crows, ducks cackling over some joke (probably about me), and the honks of the itinerant geese who swoop onto the water’s surface in a tight squadron formation.
The turtles, of course, are silent. But wave a piece of bread and they will emerge from their depths.
A few weeks ago, my ears picked up a different tune, a new language to this United Nations of Birds.
There was now another soloist on the scene.
The melodies were at times searching and others soulful, even sad, like a lone saxophone player serenading himself on an urban street corner.
At first I thought these polished calls to the wild were coming from a neighbor’s child, a kid trying to evoke a response from the various winged residents in his midst.
There were ventriloquist whoops and conversation starters, intelligent and thought-out. Here was a comedian trying out new punch lines in bird speak, I imaged, or a pianist amusing himself with some new practice scales.
Each time I heard these new notes, I’d dash out onto the porch to try and spy the singer. And then one day I saw him.
He was a child in a way, smart and inquisitive, ever playful.
He was my next door neighbor’s African Gray parrot.
Psittacus erithacus.
That afternoon, he was busy, employing his beak and claws to shimmy down one of his wooden back-porch perches.
I went outside to make his acquaintance.
As I stood a few feet away, he cocked his head, sizing me up in that one-eyed way that birds do.
My older sister Dale once owned a Caique parrot named Dr. Who and I repeated a greeting I’d heard her use a million times.
“Pretty bird,” I said. “Hello, pretty bird.”
We eyeballed one another for a few moments until I realized my presence might be stymieing his calls, stepping on his vibe.
As I walked away, the bird did something no other winged pond-dweller could match.
He called out to me.
In my own language.
“Hello,” he said.
I'd made a new friend.
His name, I would soon learn, is Simon.
I’d never really been big on birds. I’ve owned cats mostly, and a dog when I was a kid.
But my sister adores them. Her husband callled her Dale Bird.
Over the years she hosted cockatoos — an umbrella and a citron — cockatiels, lovebirds and an Indian ringneck parrot.
The character I remember most was Dr. Who, the Caique parrot. His body was green and his head was both orange and yellow. He’d perform tricks and roll over dead whenever Dale went to pick him up.
He was also messy. My sister, it seemed, was always cleaning his cage.
And he had declared enemies. He didn’t like my mother or my brother and attacked both of them. He also hated the woman who came to trim his nails.
Looking back, I probably did not give Doctor Who much of a chance. Like most birds, he just seemed so squawky, a neurotic nuisance.
I used to tease my sister for her subscription to Bird Talk magazine, as though she was wasting her time trying to relate to the brains of birds.
But Simon is somehow different.
Maybe I’m different too.
Lately, I have been reading the naturalist writer Sy Montgomery, who explores the emotional world of both wild and tame animals. Her animal stories are filled with wonder, empathy and emotion, whether she’s writing about pigs or dolphins or spiders and even the misunderstood octopus.
She explores both the otherness and sameness of these creatures, which can often remind us what it means to be human.
As Montgomery writes, “Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways.”
But do animals have a conscious mind? Prevailing wisdom holds that birds possess no potential for language or anything remotely comparable to human intelligence.
One of Montgomery’s mentors is the naturalist writer Henry Beston, whose 1928 book The Outermost House posed that an animal's otherness was actually an attribute.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mythical concept of animals,” he wrote. “For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
Wow.
Like all mystical teachings, this led me to look at all animals in a new way.
Including the African Gray named Simon.
African Grays are smart birds, maybe too smart for their own good.
They can learn 100 words or more, and even use them in context. Scientists believe that it’s more than must mimicry.
They’re individuals. Winged aliens whose lifespans, at 80 years, match our own.
Research suggests the birds possess the cognitive skills of a five-year-old child. They will help members of their species without expecting such altruism to be reciprocated.
They also mimic human speech, identify shapes and colors, learn number sequences, ask unprompted questions and even hold entire conversations with their owners.
Imagine your dog looking up at you and asking, “But why should I fetch?”
And so African Grays been pursed as pets, hunted nearly to extinction throughout the rainforests of central Africa. Since 1992, it has been illegal to import such birds into the U.S. and most people find them through domestic breeders.
Perhaps the most famous African Gray was Alex, the study subject of Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who worked with the parrot, reporting his progress in scientific journals.
Over the years, Alex learned one-liners from his perch inside the lab. He could say “Calm down,” and “Good morning,” express frustration, or apparent boredom.
Pepperberg's research, of course, was controversial.
In 2007, Alex died of natural causes at the age of 31.
He had become so famous he even rated an obituary in the New York Times.
On his last night alive, the newspaper wrote, Alex gave his usual farewell to Dr. Pepperberg as she walked out the door.
“You be good, see you tomorrow,” he said. “I love you.”
He was found dead in his cage the next morning.
Pretty quickly, I began to listen for Simon’s calls.
Whenever I’d hear his whoop, I’d go out to the porch and call over to him.
And I would visit.
But Simon didn’t always seem so glad to see me. From his outdoor perch, he’d eye me silently, as though saying, “What do you want?”
One day, I ran into Simon’s human, a tall bearded man named Robert. He was sitting on a bench outside our condo, with an older woman. Simon was perched between them.
I was full of questions.
Where did you get Simon? How big is his cage? What words does he know?
Then they told me the story.
The older woman’s daughter had bought Simon from a breeder for $4,000. She was single and busy at work and apparently did not realize that African Grays require constant stimulation or will quickly become bored.
Simon was lonely after his human left for work, so twice each day the woman’s mother drove 20 miles one way to check on him.
Simon seemed to anticipate her visits.
“Hello!” he’d say. “Want some coffee?”
At her departure, he’d squawk and say “Boo!”
Finally, Robert adopted the bird, who rides atop his shoulder when he works as a local contractor. At home, Simon calls the shots. There's a house cat around as well, but the two get along.
Simon cage is in the kitchen, but he prefers the outdoors, where he can call out to his avian cousins.
And to me.
Like most parrots, he doesn’t have much sense of volume regulation, and will only stop chattering when he feels like it.
Sometimes, Robert says, he’ll climb up the kitchen drawers like on a ladder, tossing out all the utensils from the topmost one.
That day, I looked at Simon as he paced on that bench. The words came rushing from my mouth, wholly unplanned.
“I love Simon,” I said.
Robert just looked at me like he understood.
Who knows, perhaps Simon did, too.