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N'kisi
N'kisi is a grey parrot (''Psittacus erithacus'') thought to exhibit advanced English talking skills and other abilities. Accomplishments According to news reports and websites, as of January 2004 N'kisi had a vocabulary of about 950 words and used them in context, frequently in complete sentences, had approximated verb forms to maintain the correct tense (such as saying ''flied'' when not knowing the past tense of ''fly''), and did not depend on learned phrases to communicate his thoughts. N'kisi was shown as being supposedly capable of understanding photographic images, naming objects (within his vocabulary) appearing in a photo and inventing new terms for things he does not know words for by combining other words, like "pretty smell medicine" for aromatherapy oils. One anecdote recounted by the primatologist Jane Goodall says that, upon meeting her in person after seeing a photo of her, N'Kisi asked, "Got a chimp?" It was claimed he demonstrated a possible sense of humor. Co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Individual Birds
This is a list of well-known real birds. For famous fictional birds, see list of fictional birds. * Águia Vitória, a bald eagle who serves as the mascot for Portuguese football club S.L. Benfica * Albert Ross, an albatross believed to have been observed between 1967 and 1995 * Alex, a grey parrot who, in studies by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, demonstrated an ability to count; differentiate categories involving objects, colors, shapes, and materials; and understand the concept of same and different * All Alone, a Second World War homing pigeon awarded the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross * Andy, a goose born without feet who used sneakers to help him stand and walk. He was killed by an unknown perpetrator in 1991. * Ava, Amy Winehouse's pet bird, a blue jay whose death inspired the song "October Song" from the 2003 album ''Frank''. Its name is a reference to the classic Hollywood actress Ava Gardner. * B95, a red knot known for being the oldest known memb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alex (parrot)
Alex (May 1976 – 6 September 2007) was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. In her book "Alex & Me", Pepperberg describes her unique relationship with Alex and how Alex helped her understand animal minds. Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment. He was compared to Albert Einstein and at two years old was correctly answering questions made for six-year-olds. Before Pepperberg's work with Alex, it was widely believed in the scientific community that a large primate brain was needed to handle complex problems related to language and understanding; birds were not considered to be intelligent, as their only common use of communication was mimicking and repeating sounds to interact with each other. However, Alex's ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Batyr
Batyr (May 24, 1970 – August 26, 1993) was an Asian elephant claimed to be able to use a large amount of meaningful human speech. Living in a zoo in Kazakhstan in the Soviet Union, Batyr was reported as having a vocabulary of more than 20 phrases. A recording of Batyr saying "Batyr is good", his name and using words such as ''drink'' and ''give'' was played on Kazakh state radio and on the Soviet Central Television programme ''Vremya'' in 1980. Like all cases of talking animals, these claims are subject to the observer-expectancy effect. Biography Born on May 24, 1970, at Almaty Zoo, Batyr lived his entire life in the Karaganda Zoo at Karaganda in Kazakhstan. He died in 1993. Batyr was the offspring of once-wild Indian elephants (a subspecies of the Asian elephant) and was the second child of his mother, Palm, (1959–1998) and father, Dubas, (1959–1978) presented to Kazakhstan's Almaty Zoo by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The first baby elephant (Batyr's elde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Psittacus Erithacus
The grey parrot (''Psittacus erithacus''), also known as the Congo grey parrot, Congo African grey parrot or African grey parrot, is an Old World parrot in the family Psittacidae. The Timneh parrot ''(Psittacus timneh)'' once was identified as a subspecies of the grey parrot, but has since been elevated to a full species. Taxonomy The grey parrot was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his '' Systema Naturae''. He placed it with all the other parrots in the genus ''Psittacus'' and coined the binomial name ''Psittacus erithacus''. Linnaeus erroneously specified the type locality as "Guinea": the locality was later designated as Ghana in West Africa. The genus name is Latin for "parrot". The specific epithet ''erithacus'' is Latin and is derived from the Ancient Greek εριθακος (''erithakos'') for an unknown bird that was said to mimic human sounds, perhaps the black redstart. The species is monotypic: no subsp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grey Parrot
The grey parrot (''Psittacus erithacus''), also known as the Congo grey parrot, Congo African grey parrot or African grey parrot, is an Old World parrot in the family Psittacidae. The Timneh parrot ''(Psittacus timneh)'' once was identified as a subspecies of the grey parrot, but has since been elevated to a full species. Taxonomy The grey parrot was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his ''Systema Naturae''. He placed it with all the other parrots in the genus ''Psittacus'' and coined the binomial name ''Psittacus erithacus''. Linnaeus erroneously specified the type locality as "Guinea": the locality was later designated as Ghana in West Africa. The genus name is Latin for "parrot". The specific epithet ''erithacus'' is Latin and is derived from the Ancient Greek εριθακος (''erithakos'') for an unknown bird that was said to mimic human sounds, perhaps the black redstart. The species is monotypic: no subspecie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jane Goodall
Dame Jane Morris Goodall (; born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall on 3 April 1934), formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. Seen as the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 60-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees since she first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960, where she witnessed human-like behaviours amongst chimpanzees, including armed conflict. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. As of 2022, she is on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project. In April 2002, she was named a UN Messenger of Peace. Goodall is an honorary member of the World Future Council. Early years Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in 1934 in Hampstead, London, to businessman Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall (1907–2001) and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Irene Pepperberg
Irene Maxine Pepperberg (born April 1, 1949) is a scientist noted for her studies in animal cognition, particularly in relation to parrots. She has been a professor, researcher and/or lecturer at multiple universities, and she is currently a research associate and lecturer at Harvard University. Pepperberg also serves on the Advisory Council of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She is well known for her comparative studies into the cognitive fundamentals of language and communication, and she was one of the first to work on language learning in animals other than human species (exemplified by the Washoe project), by extension to a bird species. Pepperberg is also active in wildlife conservation, especially in relation to parrots. Early life, family and education Born in 1949 as Irene Platzblatt in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, she was an only child. Her father, Robert Platzblatt, was a biochemist and middle school teacher. Her parents were both first-genera ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Telepathy
Telepathy () is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and has remained more popular than the earlier expression ''thought-transference''.Glossary of Parapsychological terms – Telepathy – Parapsychological Association. Retrieved December 19, 2006. Telepathy experiments have historically been criticized for a lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no good evidence that telepathy exists, and the topic is genera ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rupert Sheldrake
Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English author and parapsychology researcher who proposed the concept of morphic resonance, a conjecture which lacks mainstream acceptance and has been criticized as pseudoscience. He has worked as a biochemist at Cambridge University, Harvard scholar, researcher at the Royal Society, and plant physiologist for ICRISAT in India. Sheldrake's morphic resonance posits that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems ... inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." Sheldrake proposes that it is also responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms." His advocacy of the idea offers idiosyncratic explanations of standard subjects in biology such as development, inheritance, and memory. Morphic resonance is not accepted by the scientific community and Sheldrake's proposals relating to it have been widely criticised. Critics cite a lack of evidence for morphic resonance and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Koko (gorilla)
Hanabiko "Koko" (July 4, 1971 – June 19, 2018) was a female western lowland gorilla. Koko was born in San Francisco Zoo, and lived most of her life at The Gorilla Foundation's preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The name , , is of Japanese origin and is a reference to her date of birth, the Fourth of July. Koko gained public attention upon a report of her having adopted a kitten as a pet and naming him "All Ball", which the public perceived as her ability to rhyme. Her instructor and caregiver, Francine Patterson, reported that Koko had an active vocabulary of more than 1,000 signs of what Patterson calls "Gorilla Sign Language" (GSL). This puts Koko's vocabulary at the same level as a three-year-old human. In contrast to other experiments attempting to teach sign language to non-human primates, Patterson simultaneously exposed Koko to spoken English from an early age. It was reported that Koko understood approximately 2,000 words of spoken English, in addition to the signs. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hoover (seal)
Hoover ( – July 25, 1985) was a harbor seal who was able to imitate basic human speech. Cundy’s Harbor On May 5, 1971, Scottie Dunning discovered a tiny male harbor seal pup on the shore of Cundy's Harbor, Maine. After a failed attempt at locating the pup's mother, Dunning called his brother-in-law George Swallow for help. When Swallow arrived, the two searched for the mother seal and later found her dead among the rocks. After careful consideration, Swallow finally decided to take the seal pup home with him. At first, it refused to drink milk from a bottle, but once advice was given by a neighbor to grind up fish and offer it to the pup, he sucked it up like a hoover (vacuum cleaner), hence his name. The Swallows kept him in their bathtub, but this proved too inconvenient within a few days. So George moved him out back to a spring-fed pond where he set up a "pup tent" enclosed by a wire fence. Hoover lived very much like a family dog and even accompanied George ridin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
