This Viral Video of a Talking Bird Will Make You Rethink Animal Intelligence
A viral TikTok video has been making the rounds, and it doesn’t feature the usual things the platform is known for: dance trends, cooking hacks, or fashion clips. Instead, it stars a parrot named Apollo. What makes Apollo remarkable is his ability to hold a kind of conversation: ask him a question, and he’ll give you an answer. The video starts off casually with his owner asking, “You want a pistachio?” From there, it quickly turns into a rapid-fire round of questions and responses.
The parrot is asked, “What’s this called?” while being shown a wrench. Without hesitation, Apollo replies, “Wrench.” When asked again later, the answer is still correct. He goes on to name a block, a rock, and even a paper bag. The trainer then raises the difficulty by asking, “What’s this made of?” Apollo responds with “metal” and later “glass.” When quizzed on color, he casually answers “purple.” In one of the more surprising moments, the trainer asks him to “Do Big Bird,” and Apollo delivers—then immediately adds, “There’s a snake.” It’s the kind of interaction that shows he isn’t just repeating sounds but making connections and responding in context.
More Than Just Mimicry
Parrots repeating words isn’t new, but what makes this video so striking is how natural the back-and-forth feels. The bird is identifying objects, materials, and colors with accuracy that rivals a child’s first years of school. At times, it gets things wrong, such as mislabeling something, but the corrections and retries demonstrate it’s not randomly spitting out syllables. It’s actually trying to understand.
This sort of exchange matches what scientists like Irene Pepperberg have been proving for decades. Pepperberg, who worked with the famous parrot Alex, showed that African greys can understand numbers, shapes, colors, and even abstract concepts like “none.” Alex once shocked her by applying “none” to a question about size, even though he had never been taught to use the word in that way.
Smarter Than Students?
In controlled studies, Pepperberg’s parrots have beaten human children and even college students at certain mental tasks. Griffin, another one of her African greys, aced a memory challenge where colored objects were hidden under cups and shuffled multiple times. He tracked the swaps so well that he matched Harvard undergrads until the difficulty got extreme.
And it doesn’t stop at memory. Parrots have passed Piaget-inspired tests about probability, which shows they can understand the idea of “more likely” in a way similar to six-year-old children. They’ve also waited up to 15 minutes for a better reward, just like kids taking the marshmallow test. One parrot even distracted himself by preening or singing while he waited.
As much as it reached 2 million likes on TikTok, Apollo isn’t just entertaining. It’s a window into a world of intelligence we’re only beginning to understand. So next time you hear the phrase “bird brain,” you might want to take it as a compliment.