Parrot is ‘attention hog’ and smart as human toddler, owners say

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.”

Dalton Mason and his wife, Victoria, went to their local pet store in St. Petersburg, Florida, to buy crickets for their gecko in 2020. They ended up bringing Apollo home.

“He had been surrendered by his original owner, and he was only 8 months old,” Dalton said.

Victoria said she wanted a parrot since before she and her husband were a couple.“Birds are the pets for us,” she said. “We’re bird people.”

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

“Social customs are easy for him to pick up on,” Dalton said.

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.”)

In addition to Apollo, the Masons have two white-bellied caiques, Soleil and Ophelia, both 3.

“I do want to distinguish that we still recognize them as animals. It’s not like we’re trying to socialize them like humans,” Victoria said. “We do what we can to work within the confines of their nature.”

White-bellied parrots are generally not as smart as African grays, the Masons said.

“They’re very good emotional support for Apollo,” Dalton said.

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. 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.

“We did 30 years of very careful research, building up a very clear argument about his understanding,” Pepperberg said of Alex, who died in 2007 at age 31.

“It was very interactive, and he could see how he could use his vocalizations to control his environment to an extent,” Pepperberg said. “The more he learned, the more he could make things happen.”

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.

“What she did with Alex proved all of this was possible,” Dalton said, adding that he had seen documentaries and read books about Alex and Pepperberg, which gave him the idea to raise Apollo in the same way.

The Masons believe their 4-year-old bird has the intellectual skills of a human toddler, and they say he loves to learn.

The Masons said they aren’t surprised that Apollo has grown a large and dedicated following on social media.

“Talking animals is one of the biggest fantasy things that exists,” Dalton said. “It’s really amazing and kind of shocking for an animal to be able to talk so well.”

Apollo caught the attention of Guinness World Records. He recently set the record for most items identified by a parrot in 3 minutes after naming 12 objects.

“Apollo is Officially Amazing,” Kylie Galloway, a senior public relations executive at Guinness World Records, wrote in an email statement to the Post.

The Masons believe that this is just the beginning of what Apollo will accomplish.

“We’re definitely excited to share the future with him,” Victoria said.