Profile: Irene Pepperberg & Alex
One woman's 30-year relationship with an African gray parrot transformed our understanding of bird intelligence.
An unlikely scientific team, Irene Pepperberg and her talking parrot, Alex, revolutionized scientists' ideas about animal communication and intelligence. Yet even after Alex's premature death, Pepperberg still struggles to convince some critics that Alex's accomplishments—counting, reasoning, identifying shapes and colors—are more than mere party tricks. (In this photo, Pepperberg poses with a new study subject named Griffin.)