I’ve loved birds as long as I can remember, and the first specific bird I remember seeing in the wild was pretty impressive – a Great Horned Owl, which flew down onto the neighbor’s lawn in front of me while I was out trick-or-treating one Halloween when I was about five years old. Later, I had additional experience with birds because of my mother. She owned an African gray parrot, and was also in the habit of picking up baby birds which had fallen from their nests, and raising them in the house. So, we had house finches and scrub jays as family members at various times during my childhood. Later, as a volunteer at the Los Angeles Zoo in the mid-1980s I got to have hands-on experience with birds (and other animals) when I helped give educational talks to the public. My favorite was Ty, a barn owl.