A hill in the middle of a great city. A flock of smuggled and abandoned birds, certainly not indigenous to the San Francisco environment in which they find themselves living. And a man who has been homeless for many years, and who is constantly on the verge of being so again, scraping by doing odd jobs and living in a single mouldy room. He's not a scientist. He doesn't know anything about birds. He doesn't know much about anything, to be honest, and seems paralysed by a spirituality he can't really define or defend.

It's not a mix one would think would lead to something wonderful, and yet it has. Perhaps the lack of scientific training is a bonus. There didn't seem to be any local experts on the conures that Bittner could talk to anyway, so he's left to observe their behaviour with no preconceptions, and no foolish idea about birds not having personalities. (Of course they do.) And so, over a period of several years, he gets interested in the birds, starts to interact with them, and his learning about them coincides with him getting his life together, and coming to understand his place - and theirs - in the universe. It's a really interesting story, and Bittner makes the parrots come alive on the page. It's easy to empathise with them... which is, of course, as it should be.