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circumstance unknown to land at one’s door in a box. There’s a certain comfort in knowing that, mentally at least, you’re properly prepared, whether for malabar pied hornbill, fairy bluebird or golden-fronted leaf-bird, that a decent attempt at feeding may be undertaken.
    For years, the natural law, the one that said all stray birds must come to us, continued to have its way; birds appeared by one means or another and, from choice, necessity or general weakness of spirit, were included in the household. The enquiring phone call, the ring at the doorbell, the happening upon the miserable stray on the pavement were joined by a new danger, the pet shop.
    Even now I have to be vigilant in pet shops, or at least in the ones that keep creatures in cages: small mammals, mice or hamsters or rats, a few cramped rabbits, possibly reptiles too, tanks of lizards, the odd small snake; the ones where, in a corner towards the back of the shop, there is a single large cage inhabited by one lone parrot, a sad-eyed African grey, a depressed-looking macaw. For me, the danger lies in thetemptation to rescue. (Recently, I succumbed. I bought two white doves I did not need, since I have plenty of white doves of my own. On the third occasion that I was in the shop and they were still there, confined, unbought, I bought them.) Reason wrestles with inclination as I dart past beseeching eyes, past silent songs of siren bunnies, past the winsome, head-tilted, smiling charms of the lonely parrot who is there, I know, only because his previous owner bought him without having heard the astonishing, clangourous power of his voice.
    The pet shop was how we came by Icarus. Bardie at the time was still young and Chicken had not yet arrived. Icarus was an eastern rosella, Platycercus eximius , like Bardie of Australian origin although of the Psittacidae, the ‘true parrots’, the other branch of the family, a small, compact-bodied bird of radiant beauty, red and blue and gold, of sweet and innocent face. He was unable to fly, which is why we were given him by the pet-shop lady, who no longer wanted the burden of continuing to look after a flightless bird nobody would buy. The feathers of his lower wings were tattered, some missing, lost to a psittacine ailment called ‘French moult’. The name itself sounded oddly euphemistic. In those far-off, almost forgotten days before the Internet could provide all information, I searched in libraries, in bird books in the pet shops, but where I found mention of French moult, I found no reassurance. About French moult, it seemed, nothing could be done. About the causes, sources were vague. Only now I discover the probable nature of the affliction, which is viral. (I discover too the controversies, the problems of nomenclature, not unlike those of German measles and various social diseases, conditions andinclinations whose attributions are designed as insults to an entire nation. The British called the disease French moult, the French, British moult. Nearer to the truth, it seems, would have been the term ‘Australian moult’, for it appears to originate from there.) Whatever the case, the name ‘French’ stuck. It is the smallest comfort that, had I known all this, had I had, at that time, access to every piece of information revealed by the resources of the crowded ether, there would still have been nothing I could have done to restore Icarus’s lost powers.
    Because of his infirmity, we could give him no other name but that of the mythological unfortunate whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.
    Icarus, the eternal terrestrial, was conveyed from place to place perched on the edge of a small, rectangular basket kept for the purpose, onto which he stepped with the airy nonchalance of the London businessman hailing a passing taxi. He was, we realised, already elderly when we got him, set into the patterns and routines of his bad-tempered ways. We put his house next to Bardie’s. Bardie, still