Parrot is ‘Attention Hog’ and Smart as Human Toddler, Owners Say

Okay, I know I am not to play favorites but my favorite birds are parrots and owls. So I am tickled to read about Apollo, a parrot profiled in the Washington Post, who identifies objects, colors and some numbers. He can also distinguish among glass, metal and paper. 

Here is a short excerpt:

Apollo is an African gray parrot with a deep love of pistachios and millions of social media followers. He also has the brain power of a human toddler, according to his owners. “He’s very bubbly, he’s very outgoing, he wants to really perform for everybody,” said Dalton Mason, one of Apollo’s owners. “He’s a complete and total showoff.”

The couple have trained their pet parrot to identify objects, colors and some numbers. He can ask “What’s this?” and then correctly distinguish among glass, metal and paper. He also greets humans with “Hey, buddies” and can complete simple puzzles.

Apollo has a lot of fans. On a TikTok account run by the Masons, the bird has 2.9 million followers. He also has 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube, and 1.3 million followers on Instagram. He started making headlines back in 2022. “We attribute his social media success to his nature,” Dalton said. “He’s an attention hog.”

The Masons now dedicate their lives to training Apollo. They both do it full time, because the earnings from his social media accounts provide an income for them. “We spend a lot of time with him,” Victoria said, explaining that raising a pet parrot requires work, as they can be loud, destructive and demanding. (In one viral video, Apollo says “I want fresh water.”)

African gray parrots have become known for their innate intelligence and capacity for learning, in large part due to the research of Irene Pepperberg, a scientist specializing in animal cognition. She spent decades studying one African gray parrot, Alex, and observing his vocal behavior, including while she was a research associate at Harvard University.

“What Apollo is doing is fascinating,” Pepperberg said in an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s showing that Alex was not just some Einstein parrot, that other parrots are capable.” “I want people to understand and really appreciate the fact that these people are devoting their entire lives to this bird, and very few people in the world can do that,” Pepperberg continued. “It’s time and effort and energy that has to be put into this.”

Pepperberg used a training method for Alex called the model/rival technique, which involves two trainers. One gives the animal instructions while the other models correct and incorrect responses. The model trainer acts as the parrot’s rival student, vying for the other trainer’s attention. When Pepperberg began her research, “parrots were considered mindless mimics, because nobody figured out how to train them accordingly,” she said. “Nobody believed that this could work.”

Apollo enjoys a muffin. (Victoria Mason)

 

African gray parrots have the natural capacity to be strong students, Pepperberg said. Their vocal tract allows them to speak more clearly than other parrots, and “they have an extra bit of brain that seems to be used for learning,” she said. For Alex, “it wasn’t just a simple stimulus response or associative learning. He really understood what we were talking about,” Pepperberg said, noting that she tested Alex’s cognitive skills at the level of a 4-year-old human.

The Masons have used the same training strategy with Apollo.

Apollo caught the attention of Guinness World Records. He recently set the record for most items identified by a parrot in three minutes after naming 12 objects, including socks, a book and a bug.