Not bad for a bird with a brain 7,000 times smaller than our own.

It would be a horribly inefficient system if they flew all around the place visiting flowers they had already emptied. As a matter of fact, they would be using more energy than they would be taking in. That's why we expected them to be able to do this, and we were, of course, delighted to find that they could indeed solve this type of problem.

That is something I don't think I could do very accurately at all.

I like to think that I've got determination, and I'm fiercely protective of the people I love.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

There are two perspectives on the oil sands. You have companies that want to make it the next Saudi Arabia. The other is that it's a transitional resource to a low-carbon economy, and to regard it as anything else is to drain the continent's financial resources.