Pets that Talk — Alexander

My Webster’s lists the verb form of “parrot” as “to repeat by rote.” That was pretty much my impression of what a parrot does, too. Then I met Alexander.

Alexander is a Vosmaerai eclectus, a species notable for sexual dimorphism more extreme than any other in the bird world; the females look so unlike the males that they were thought to be different species until the 20th Century.  They’re native to New Guinea, but Alexander was hatched at Magnolia Bird Farm in Riverside, California. Maureen was there for it, and visited him constantly, and took him home with her five weeks later.

Alexander is a bit of a mess and something of a runt. His left shoulder is malformed and his wing won’t fully extend; he will never fly. He compulsively picks at himself (something wild parrots have never been observed to do) and has to wear a collar; otherwise, he will pull out highly vascular bloodfeathers and bleed to death. We hate the collar as much as Alexander does, and remove it whenever we think it will be safe — when he isn’t growing major feathers, which ain’t often.

Alexander seems about as smart as a three-year-old human being. I say this with some measure of objectivity, as someone with little prior experience of parrots and little sentimentality regarding them. I’ve seen him identify colors and objects from groups with no cueing from Maureen (that I observed, anyhow). He makes up games with consistent rules, usually involving the way an object is to be shared between him, me, and Mo, and gets flustered if you can’t figure out the rules.

And he talks. Oh, man, does he talk. I couldn’t say how large his vocabulary is, but it changes all the time, and one of the things that I’m still not used to is his ability to change inflection on words to convey different meaning, even though he hasn’t heard that word said that way before. He seems to understand that meaning changes with tone. He demonstrates this a lot around our neighbor Tiffany, because he seems to have a crush on her. (He likes girls a lot better than boys anyhow, but Tiffany is a special case for him.) He says “Hi” to her when she’s in her backyard, in a special tone he reserves exclusively for her. It sounds like a guy at a bar radar-locking on a babe a couple of stools down. You can almost here the “well, hel-LO there.”

He also imitates environmental noises (train brakes were a favorite for a while), and caws at crows with some pretty funny results if they get a look at him. The crows tend to circle and get other crows to take a look as well, refusing to believe that the picture doesn’t match the sound. I got him to say “quack quack quack” for a while, and do some Warner Bros. cartoon sound effects. Sometimes he talks in his sleep. That takes getting used to. He’s awakened yelling from nightmares a few times too. He most definitely will put words together in different combinations to form sentences he has not heard before. There’s cognition there.

Alexander loves to watch Powerpuff Girls and Dexter’s Lab. He laughs at appropriate moments (sometimes I hear it in stereo when he and Maureen laugh together — in identical voices). He has a thing for anything that drones, like a fan or a leaf blower, and will talk like mad when a drone is going. When Mo composes he sings along, in time and on key. I’ll never get used to hearing them do call-and-response, with Alexander basically playing “Simon” and getting annoyed if you don’t replicate his pattern (which he varies as he goes). At the end of this post are two recordings of Alexander accompanying Maureen (or vice versa, really), one a call-and-response, the other pretty much an improvised duet.

Where Murdoc is a grumpy misanthrope, Alexander is a genuinely sweet character who shares things and likes to play with others. Both birds can be counted on to sound off whenever I have a business call or phone interview, which adds that special touch of professionalism. It’s also a fitting irony that I — who have written a rather large amount of fiction dealing with what are basically sentient animals, and who have made my opinion of furries pretty well known over the years — would end up living with animals that talk.

(This audio player app for WordPress sucks the rope-veined boy bone, so I’m including download links as well.)

Mo & Alexander – Duet
[audio:http://www.steveboy.com/audio/mo_and_alexander_-_duet.mp3]

Mo & Alexander – Call & Response
[audio:http://www.steveboy.com/audio/mo_and_alexander_-_call_and_response.mp3]