Remember my earlier post about the “rational parrot”? Well, the BBC link that used to point to that amazing story now points instead to this not-so-amazing story. In a brief note the BBC explains that the original story “contained factual inaccuracies we were unable to correct” and is “no longer in our archive.”
So what was true and what was false in the original story about N’kisi the grey parrot? Apparently not everything was false, since the replacement story does mention N’kisi in passing as having an impressive vocabulary. But it would be nice to have a more informative retraction, if that’s what it is.
In the meantime, check out this mile-wide parrot. Or whatever.
Robert Todd Carroll’s Skeptic’s Dictionary has a page about N’Kisi:
http://skepdic.com/nkisi.html