Birds are everywhere in our literature, a part, it seems, of our collective poetic imagination. If writing a beautiful line of poetry fills a poet's heart with joy, imagine how that same poet's soul must take flight at the sight of swallows soaring through the evening sky!

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

I heard a bird so sing, Whose music, to my thinking, pleased the king.

He is a fool who lets slip a bird in the hand for a bird in the bush.

That which prevents disagreeable flies from feeding on your repast, was once the proud tail of a splendid bird.

It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn't coo, or caw, or trill, or song. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.