Alex the African grey parrot, and the last words everyone quotes. · published 12 September 2026
The sentence everyone quotes as Alex the grey parrot’s farewell was simply what he said to Irene Pepperberg every night when she left the lab — and the quieter, better story is the thirty years of controlled testing behind it, where he labelled colours, shapes and numbers for questioners who had not trained him, and once used “none” to report an absence nobody had taught him to name.
These are the working notes, unedited. Everything the video
states as fact comes from here, and nothing else may be stated as fact.
The sections on limits and on what the finding does not show are
part of the brief, not an afterthought — see
the method.
The work: Irene Pepperberg bought Alex from a pet shop in 1977 and worked with him for thirty years. By the end he had roughly a hundred labels: about fifty objects, seven colours, five shapes, and the numbers one to six. He could be shown a tray and asked how many of the objects were both green and made of wood, and answer.
Why it was taken seriously. Pepperberg trained with the model/rival method: two people handle an object in front of the bird, one asking and one answering, so the parrot sees the exchange being used rather than being drilled on a cue. And she built the testing around the Clever Hans problem deliberately — the questioner was often someone who had not trained him, and the person asking was kept from tipping the answer, because working intensively with a single animal is exactly the situation that produces a Clever Hans effect. The controls are the reason the work is cited at all.
The zero result. In a session on numbers Alex used the word “none” without being taught it for that purpose, to report an absence of a quantity. It was followed up in a series of trials and held. Pepperberg’s own framing is careful and the thing to repeat: something like a zero concept, not a demonstrated grasp of zero as a mathematician means it.
The famous part. Alex was found dead in his cage on 6 September 2007, aged thirty-one. The last thing he said to Pepperberg was: “You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow.”
What the retelling leaves out
That sentence was not a farewell. It was what he said every night when she left the laboratory — the ordinary closing of an ordinary evening, which happened to be the last one. It is repeated as a deathbed message, and the true version is quieter and better: a routine goodbye that only became remarkable in hindsight.
Limits
One bird, thirty years, one laboratory. Whether Alex understood “I love you” as anything beyond a learned phrase attached to a departure is not established, and Pepperberg has not claimed it was. Critics have argued the interpretations are anthropomorphic and that results from a single intensively trained animal may not generalise to grey parrots at large. Those are fair, and none of them require the training or the testing to have been sloppy.
What this does not show
Not that Alex was a fraud or a mere mimic — the comprehension results were tested under controls designed by someone who knew exactly what Clever Hans was. And not, at the other extreme, that a parrot was declaring love as a person would. The honest position sits in between and is harder to tell: a bird demonstrably doing more than repeating sounds, and a sentence whose meaning to him nobody can establish.