Corin says:
"An African Grey Parrot called N'kisi has a vocabulary of 950 words and can 'communicate' (as opposed to repeat). He has a sense of humour as well. Amazed by this [article on the BBC web site] I searched a little and found a recording of the bird with his owner. Initially I thought 'why they hell did you put the microphone next to the person and not the bird?' before I realised it wasn't the person I was listening to but the bird."
He uses words in context, with past, present and future tenses, and is often inventive.One N'kisi-ism was "flied" for "flew", and another "pretty smell medicine" to describe the aromatherapy oils used by his owner, an artist based in New York.
When he first met Dr Jane Goodall, the renowned chimpanzee expert, after seeing her in a picture with apes, N'kisi said: "Got a chimp?"
N'kisi with picture card and teacher Grace Roselli
School's in: He is a willing learner
He appears to fancy himself as a humourist. When another parrot hung upside down from its perch, he commented: "You got to put this bird on the camera."
Reader comment:
Matt says:
I was also amazed by the BBC article, and did a bit of searching myself,
and came across this abstract of a
telepathy study which was done with the bird. It was linked from the
Skeptic's Dictionary entry on N'kisi which has some more interesting information. It seems as though the
BBC article was referring to the telepathy study, although it doesn't
make it clear at all that N'kisi can't see the cards his owner was
opening.
Nigel says:
I just read your BoingBoing post about the supposedly super articulate parrot & thought I'd mention that what's probably more interesting about the BBC's story than it being about a talking animal is the credulousness of the reporter who wrote it. Language Log (which if you don't read, I'd highly recommend) covered this pretty well when the story came out — Geoffrey K Pullum's "Stupid Pet Communication Tricks" post is a good start. The BBC's science reporting (vague unsubstantiated assertion here — but hey, I'm not a journalist) is not what it's best at, bless it.
Chris says:
I first heard about this bird a few years ago on Alan Alda's Scientific
American Frontiers. There is a good video with that parrot here (3rd video
down).
Audun Vaaler says:
It seems that the parrot Chris refers to in his comment to the story about N'kisi the parrot is an even more famous parrot named Alex. Alex is one of the subjects of Irene Pepperberg's considerably more respected research on animal cognition.
