Wes Phillips

"If Alex were a dog, he would be 189 years old. But he's a parrot and he's 27. In parrot years that's 27. Unless Alex chokes on a nut or falls out of his cage, he should live another 50 years. In a perfect world, healthy parrots can live 80 to 90 years."

We know it didn't turn out that way. Seed reprints its 2004 article on Alex, the grey African parrot.