African Grey
The parrot most studied for intelligence, and the one that uses words in context rather than only copying them. Fifty years is a normal life for one.
Overview
The African grey is the parrot that changed what people thought parrots were. Alex, the bird Irene Pepperberg worked with for thirty years, could label 50 different objects, 7 colours, 5 shapes and quantities up to and including six, and used the words rather than repeating them.
It is a medium sized parrot, about 33 cm head to tail with a 46 to 52 cm wingspan and up to 407 g, from the moist lowland forests of central and West Africa. ADW lists it Near Threatened, on CITES Appendix II, with as much as 21 percent of the global population taken from the wild each year.
Temperament
Reserved, watchful and deeply attached to routine. An African grey is not a bird that greets strangers. It observes them, and it decides slowly.
The intelligence is the whole animal and it is also the difficulty. A grey with nothing to work on invents something, and what it invents is usually feather plucking or a scream it has discovered gets a response. They bond hard, often to one person, and a bird that has bonded that way notices when the household changes. Captive average lifespan is 45 years against 22.7 in the wild, so the bird will very likely outlast the arrangement it came into.
Care and grooming
A formulated pellet as the base, with vegetables and some fruit. Seed only diets are deficient in vitamin A, in the amino acids lysine and methionine, and in calcium, and greys are particularly prone to calcium deficiency.
They produce a fine white feather dust, and it is the dust rather than the feathers that people react to. No parrot is hypoallergenic. A house with an air filter and a bird that gets regular bathing is a manageable one, and a household with someone genuinely allergic is not.
Living and exercise
A cage of at least 36 by 24 by 48 inches as a base, not as the day. Out of cage time in a bird safe room is where the exercise and most of the mental work happens.
Foraging toys matter more for this species than for almost any other. A grey that has to work for part of its food spends its day the way a wild one would, and the difference between that bird and a bird with a full bowl and a mirror is visible within weeks.
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