Esther Woolfson is, in the nicest possible way, potty about birds. And she is interested in their existence not as you or I might be, merely in the ornithological sense, but in birds as sharers of human living space.

As one brought up on a rural smallholding to which the local people brought for harbourage a stream of stricken avians – the concussed gull, the unfledged house sparrow and the, alas, irreparably broken-winged peewit – I am familiar with the mental condition that simply cannot say ‘no’ to any bird that is proffered.

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