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According to Irene Pepperberg, there's more to birds than we think. She calls herself an ethologist, but uses comparative psychology to carry out her studies. As hundreds of published interviews and papers suggest, she has achieved an unprecedented understanding of the cognitive and communicative abilities of African gray parrots.

"What we do," she explains, "is train them to communicate with us, using the sound of English speech. Then, we use communication code to help examine their cognition." A disruptive little parrot named Wart gurgles in the background as Pepperberg speaks. "Wart, you can't eat my hand," she scolds.

A doctoral degree in theoretical chemistry taught Pepperberg how to think. But an itching desire to answer the question, "Why do birds sing?" drove her to go straight to the source to find out.

Television portrayals of animal researchers have always bothered Pepperberg. In the past, says Pepperberg, televised studies on animal behavior typically showed the researcher shooting darts at an animal or wrestling it to the ground. This, she says, is an irresponsibly false depiction of how we actually study animals.

In 1974, a new TV series promised to alter public perception of animal research techniques. "Here were these wonderful NOVA programs that were actually showing real ways that researchers study animals. I was fascinated by the studies on signing chimps and the work that was being done on communication with dolphins," she remembers.

During that time, Pepperberg perceived a communicative ability in birds that had been ignored by researchers. She thought, "There's something to this, and nobody's looking at birds the way people are looking at chimps. But these parrots can produce speech. There must be something there!"

As Wart grabs hold of her ring, Pepperberg describes the results of her hard work. Alex is the oldest African gray parrot that she has trained. He's been an attentive pupil, though talkative at times.

"He's learned to identify about 50 different objects. He knows seven different colors. He knows five shapes. He knows quantities to six. He has concepts of categories. He knows concepts of bigger and smaller, of same and different, of absence of information."

With this combination of cognitive and communicative abilities, explains Pepperberg, Alex can interact with humans and express himself. "He combines these labels to identify, request, refuse, and categorize more than 100 different things."

Pepperberg describes her work as "fascinating." However, she admits that there are drawbacks to the path she's taken. Sometimes, she says, it's just plain exhausting. "I have been in more places than many people and yet, at this point you look at it and go, 'Jet lag. Weird food. Being tired.' You stop looking at it from the positive because it's overload."

When all is said and done, the rewards of an original discovery make it all worthwhile for Pepperberg. "I tell my students that the excitement is when you've learned something that nobody else in the world knows. When you've designed this experiment and you've been really careful. And you got it right. And now you know something. There's that moment when you found something that nobody else in the world knows. It's an incredible high."

Throughout the course of his long career, professor Rod Wong has concentrated on several phases of research. "I did work on activity wheel running in rats [as a means of testing drugs and hormones], frustration and effects on rat behavior, early stimulation of rat pups and effects on learning."

The rewards and learning curves of lab work, says Wong, are tremendous. "Writing it up for a publication is like telling a story about an attempt to understand what's going on and why."

There are very few individuals who can earn a living by doing nothing else but studying animals, says Wong. "Like most academics," he says, "my time was distributed between research, teaching and administration." In other words, comparative psychologists rarely find the funding to make a living out of research alone.

Pepperberg agrees. It is tough work trying to make a living in this field. "I tend to work 13-hour days, six days a week. There's relatively little grant money, there are a lot of people competing for this grant money, so there's a lot of stress there." Not only is the funding scarce, explains Pepperberg, but there just aren't many jobs out there for comparative psychologists.

"Go into it because you love the work -- and not for any other reason. That's what's going to carry you through, because it's hard work and you have to really love it."