Apollo is an African grey parrot with a deep love of peanuts and millions of social media followers. According to his owners, he also has the brainpower of a human child.
“He’s very cheerful, very outgoing, he really wants to perform for everybody,” said Dalton Mason, one of Apollo’s owners. “He’s a show-off.”
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Dalton Mason and his wife, Victoria, went to local pet stores in St. Petersburg to buy crickets for their geckos in 2020. They eventually brought Apollo home.
“He was surrendered by his original owner and was only 8 months old,” Dalton said.
Victoria said that she wanted a parrot even before she married her husband.
“Birds are our pets,” he said. “We are bird people.”
The couple trained their pet parrot to recognize objects, colors and some numbers. It can ask, “What’s this?” and then correctly distinguish between glass, metal and paper. It can also greet people with “Hey, buddies” and complete simple puzzles.
“It was easy for him to grasp the social mores,” Dalton said.
Apollo has a lot of fans. On a TikTok account run by 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 in 2022.
“We attribute his success on social media to his nature,” Dalton said. “He’s a center of attention.”
The Masons now devote their lives to training Apollo, and both do it full time because they earn money from their social media accounts.
“We spend a lot of time with him,” Victoria said, explaining that keeping a pet parrot is demanding because they can be noisy, destructive and demanding. (“I want clean water,” Apollo says in a viral video.)
In addition to Apollo, the Masons have two other 3-year-old white-bellied barques named Soleil and Ophelia.
“I want to emphasize that we still see them as animals. We don’t try to socialize them like humans,” Victoria said. “We do our best to work within the boundaries of their nature.”
Mason explained that white-bellied parrots are generally not as intelligent as African grey parrots.
“They provide very good emotional support for Apollo,” Dalton said.
African grey parrots have become known for their innate intelligence and capacity to learn, largely thanks to the research of Irene Pepperberg, a scientist specializing in animal cognition. She studied Alex, an African grey parrot, for decades and observed his vocal behavior, including during her time as a research assistant at Harvard University.
“What Apollo did is fascinating,” Pepperberg told The Washington Post. “It shows that Alex is not just an Einstein parrot, that other parrots are capable too.”
“I want people to understand and really appreciate that these people have dedicated their entire lives to this bird, and that very few people in the world have been able to do that,” Pepperberg continued. “It takes time, effort and energy.”
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 tries to get the other trainer’s attention by acting like the parrot’s rival student.
When Pepperberg began his research, “parrots were thought to be mindless imitators because no one had figured out how to train them to do so,” he said. “No one believed it could work.”
“We did very careful research over 30 years and built a very clear argument about his conception,” Pepperberg said of Alex, who died in 2007 at age 31. African grey parrots in captivity typically live 40 to 60 years.
“He was very interactive and could see how he could control his environment to some extent using his vocalizations,” Pepperberg said. “The more he learned, the more he was able to accomplish.”
African grey parrots have a natural capacity to be strong learners, Pepperberg said. Their vocal tracts allow them to speak more clearly than other parrots, and “they have an extra brain that is used for learning,” he said.
For Alex, “this wasn’t just a simple stimulus response or associative learning. He really understood what we were talking about,” Pepperberg said, noting that he tested Alex’s cognitive skills at the level of a 4-year-old.
The Masons used the same training strategy at Apollo.
“What he did to Alex proved that all of this was possible,” Dalton said, adding that he had watched 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 say he loves to learn.
“From what we can see, he’s extremely happy,” Dalton said, noting that Gracie Barrentine, a student at Eckerd College in Florida who is conducting scientific studies on Apollo, “He’s very well socialized.”
Masons said they were not surprised that Apollo had developed a large and loyal following on social media.
“Animal speech is one of the greatest fantasies there is,” Dalton said. “It’s really amazing and kind of shocking that an animal can talk that well.”
Apollo caught the attention of Guinness World Records. He recently broke the record for most objects identified by a parrot in three minutes after naming 12 objects, including a sock, a book and a bug.
“Apollo is absolutely magnificent,” Kylie Galloway, senior public relations manager for Guinness World Records, told The Post in an emailed statement.
Masons believe that this is only the beginning of what Apollo will accomplish.
“We are absolutely thrilled to share the future with him,” Victoria said.
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