Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura
Alex, a 20-year-old YouTube star from Brisbane, Australia, has the kind of weekday routine that makes your average working stiff jealous. Each morning, he greets the sun and hydrates. He eats a leisurely breakfast of greens, that his manager, Annika Howells, prepares and brings out for him.
(He sleeps on the balcony.) The afternoon is dedicated to napping, chatting with neighbors, and grooming to keep up his good looks.Evening is when the movie magic happens. As Alex goofs around with his son and housemate, Dominic—a YouTube up-and-comer himself—Howells keeps her phone nearby, in case they come up with something really good. A video from early February, in which Alex honks at various kitchen items, has pulled in about 130,000 views: not exactly Gangnam Style levels, but certainly not bad for a bird.
Alex—who goes by Alex the Honking Bird on his various social media platforms—is a rare thing: a YouTuber who has crossed the species line. In his burgeoning career as a celebrity cockatiel, Alex has earned human admirers, who enjoy watching him perform his trademark honking song. But he also has a growing legion of bird imitators, who flutter over when they hear his voice, and spend their spare time practicing their own honks. There’s that adage: On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But what if everybody, including other birds, knows you’re a bird—and that’s why they like you?
Howells didn’t mean to teach Alex to honk. Young male cockatiels are very good at picking up sounds—as evidenced by a rash of birds that have learned to imitate microwaves, tooth-brushing, and that
burbly iPhone ringtone—and their human companions will often take advantage of this skill by teaching them particular whistles. This is both fun and practical: parrots tend to pair-bond with their owners, and as one bird lover explains, “Even if your bird can’t see you, they want to know you’re still around. ” Establishing a particular “What’s up!” whistle, or contact call, keeps bird and human reassured, even when they’re in different rooms.Howells can’t whistle, so when she got Alex nearly 20 years ago, she found a creative way to keep up her end of the bargain: Instead of encouraging Alex to imitate her, she imitated him. “When I got him, he would do this little squeak and bob his head,” she says. “So I would do the little squeak and bob my head back at him.” He would mimic her in turn, she says, and “it just got exaggerated over time,” until one day it had evolved into his full-on, foghorn honk.
Alex spent years happily honking and headbanging with the members of his household, from humans to his fellow birds to various home furnishings and appliances. Howells would occasionally film him doing something cute and upload it to YouTube, so she could share it with friends and family. Last summer, for whatever reason, other people started finding an older video, “Cockatiel reacts to plush toy version of himself,” in which Alex makes friends with an enormous stuffed bird.
“I don’t know if an algorithm got tweaked or something,” Howells says, “but all of a sudden it was getting all these views.” She licensed it to a viral video company, and it spread far and wide. When people started asking for more Alex, “I just kept running with it,” Howells says. She made him a Twitter account and a Facebook page and started posting videos more regularly, and Alex now has tens of thousands of followers on each platform.
As a human myself, I feel confident diagnosing why Alex’s videos are so popular with our species. Honking is funny, and the way Alex goes about it is…
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