For children: Bird and Dog get into adventures that will take them away from the lives they’ve known

On top of having scared off the worms, the noise of the siren was an annoying distraction. Bird was listening for the tweets of other birds, tweets saying that they had found something delicious to eat. Bird mostly found food by sight and sound, and her keen senses were affected by the loud noise and the incessant barking of the neighbourhood dogs.

Sometimes, Bird wished she was like those birds that lived in rural areas, the ones that dove for food in large lakes and rivers that teemed with fish. Those country birds had such an easy life and a bucolic existence. She imagined what it would be like if she was one of those birds, like the parrots and vultures who could find food by using their olfactory senses. Bird was a smart creature (just examine her vocabulary) but there were definite limits to her ability to find food.

In the city there were minimal options. Bird’s city life involved much more hopping around on endless lawns looking for nourishment, searching for and eating insects that were attracted to lights in parking lots, flying around on the lookout for other birds who had identified a choice meal.

Like humans, Bird conjectured, her...

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