A few houses down, on the top floor of a double decker, an elderly man with a bird on his shoulder stood in his window. An amber light shone down on the pair of them, so there’s no way for me to tell what color the bird really was, but I think he was something like blue and orange and yellow. I also wasn’t wearing my glasses — so who’s to say if it was really a bird at all.
David Alexander, a scientist at the University of Kansas and the author of “On the Wing: Insects, Pterosaurs, Birds, Bats and the Evolution of Animal Flight,” always had an interest in flight. His...
