In this age of grand stupidity, birds seemed increasingly clever to Adam. In fact, across the whole history of human folly, they had carried on doing pretty much the same thing.

The revelation of what it meant to watch them had come to him shortly after he’d moved to LA. A favourite relative had visited, an eccentric uncle whose taste in books and wine Adam admired, but whose birdwatching habit he’d always considered faintly amusing. They’d driven to Santa Barbara to visit a distant cousin – a gentle, diffident widower who lived in an upscale apartment block on the edge of town.

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