If I could imagine my age I must have been about nine or ten, and it was the hottest summer ever, when the songbird thrush fell from the window ledge outside my house and onto the slabbed path at my feet. Then again it might have been a plague beaked starling with plumage like an oil-slick, for such are the tricks of memory. I picked it up, intent on saving it-although I wasn’t quite sure how-but dropped it just as quickly as the fleas, knowing...