I hate Whole Foods.

'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.