Parrots get bored

It is the first day of September and everyone in the world has had a summer holiday except me. I don’t mind that much: I like the intensity of deadlines, so I was always good at exams, and I write best when I am under pressure. And I will go somewhere beautiful when the book is done. Meanwhile I will come to my studio and stay here for ten hours a day six days a week until then. (I do not write for ten hours, I faff and read and then write then faff and read then write.)

I love September. I love autumn. In fact, although I like summer evenings and that long long daylight, summer is my least favourite season. Yesterday when I cycled down to my studio, two miles downhill, I was chilled. Autumn. This means that all the Instagram photos of holidays will now be replaced by children in school uniform. And I can stop panicking about my under-tended allotment. And I can get my headtorch out of the cupboard.

I don’t have much to say this week. Except, this piece by Emma Beddington is the best thing I’ve read in ages. Thanks to Emma, I spent a good part of yesterday listening to a cat purring. And at some point (not until March 2024 when it opens again) I will also go and ring the fish doorbell.

Explanation from the good people of Utrecht:

Every spring, fish swim right through Utrecht, looking for a place to spawn and reproduce. Some swim all the way to Germany. There is a problem, however: they often have to wait a long time at the Weerdsluis lock on the west side of the inner city, as the lock rarely opens in spring. We have come up with a solution: the fish doorbell! An underwater camera has been set up at the lock, and the live feed is streamed to the homepage. If you see a fish, press the digital fish doorbell. The lock operator is sent a signal and can open the lock if there are enough fish. Now you can help fish make it through the canals of Utrecht.

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Medical update

It wasn’t my HRT that stopped working. It was the melatonin I was taking for poor sleep. There is no proven clinical link between melantonin and depression, but it is known to be a dopamine suppressant. And into that absence of a clinical link Reddit comes charging in, with endless accounts of people who felt woeful the day after taking melatonin. So to preserve my sometimes fragile mental stability I know I must now avoid:

• all alcohol

• any sleeping aid that is anti-histamine (especially zopiclone, which gives me hallucinations)

• melatonin

And in other HRT news, there’s yet another official shortage of Estradot. I submitted a prescription nearly two months ago that is still unfilled. I wrote to my contact at Novartis to ask what was going on (as my pharmacist had no idea). That reaped a letter addressed to me and written in the first person but unsigned — that’s just rude — from Sandoz, a Novartis subsidiary. The usual excuses: increased demand, lack of manufacturing capacity. I’m glad that more women are finding HRT useful. I wish that men who decide they’d like to pretend to be women did not need to use our precious HRT supplies to do that. I was told recently that HRT is being exchanged on a kind of black market by men experimenting with taking hormones. Experimenting? When these drugs are in some cases actually life-saving for menopausal women? How dare you.

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Animal hero of the week: Alex

Alex did not save anyone’s life. Alex was not heroic in that way, but he was exceptional. I’ve been thinking a lot about animal sentience, and how humans can be made to feel sympathy or empathy for animals so that cruelty to animals is reduced. The fish doorbell, for example: it is a way to get people to give a damn about fishes and they have done it by the very simple method of a webcam. I’m writing about a Marine Protected Area in Norway at the moment, where an underwater camera has been installed to track the local inhabitants, but bafflingly, the local authority will not allow the camera to be livestreamed. There is no better way to protect a local habitat than to get local humans to give a damn about that habitat.

Alex, though. Alex was a grey parrot (that is his breed and his colour) and the participant in/subject of a thirty-year experiment by psychologist Irene Pepperberg. Alex was called Alex because it stood for Avian Learning Experiment. She bought him from a pet shop, asking the store employee to choose him so she could not be accused of bias: she wanted to prove that any bird could be taught. At the time, science thought only large primate brains were any cop. Smaller animal brains could not reason. Alex proved them wrong. He learned more than 150 words.

Listing Alex's accomplishments in 1999, Pepperberg said he could identify 50 different objects and recognize quantities up to six; that he could distinguish seven colors and five shapes, and understand the concepts of "bigger", "smaller", "same", and "different", and that he was learning "over" and "under."

That’s all great, but what I like about Alex is that he could be a dick, and why not?

Once, Alex was given several different colored blocks (two red, three blue, and four green—similar to the picture above). Pepperberg asked him, "What color three?" expecting him to say blue. However, as Alex had been asked this question before, he seemed to have become bored. He answered "five!" This kept occurring until Pepperberg said "Fine, what color five?" Alex replied "none". This was said to suggest that parrots, like humans, get bored. Sometimes, Alex answered the questions incorrectly, despite knowing the correct answer.

Alex knew shapes, colours and what things were. Here is Alex:

Alex was the first non-human animal to ask an existential question, when he looked in the mirror and asked “what colour?”

In 2007, when Alex was 31 years old, he died. The night before, Irene Pepperberg had put him in his cage, he said, “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”

Next time you use “bird-brain” as an insult, think again.

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