Friday, April 20, 2007

Video: Parakeet Tricks


Found while surfing at Bereft.

I don't know anything about the blog, but it seems to have a lot of information regarding Iran. I am adding it to the aggregator accordingly.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

thats awsome how do you teack them that

Hoots said...

(I wish comments carried dates. This one came September 19.)
Interesting you should come across this forgotten post. Just last week the world's most famous parrot died of unknown causes. His name was Alex and his trainer was Irene Pepperberg.

Pepperberg, who was trained as a chemist, bought Alex from a pet shop in 1977, when the bird was a year old. Using a new technique, Pepperberg taught Alex to classify and group objects by their physical properties, such as their color or the material they were made of.

When presented with a tray of objects, Alex could identify which were blue, metal or round.

"This animal had concepts, not just labels, and some concept of numbers," said Georg F. Striedter, an assistant professor of neurobiology who studies parrot cognition at UC Irvine. Alex showed that parrots were "smarter then we used to believe."



You might want to research that line of information. At least this one bird was extraordinarily smart.