I fell asleep for a bit this afternoon and dreamed that I got a call from my agent. James Franco had requested me personally to teach him bird calls, specifically California shore bird calls, which apparently were my specialty. I was skeptical, not sure I could deal with a dilettante trying to learn in a week what had taken me my entire birding career, but I took the job. When I arrived, James Franco was sitting on a metal chair in a poorly lit concrete bunker, in an orange t‑shirt and brown pants, whistling like a lunatic. Uncertain if I should interrupt, I started to set up my playback system, which involved reel-to-reel tape recorders, a Super‑8 movie screen, and cockpit headsets. Franco stopped me. He didn’t want to learn how to identify birds by their calls, he said. He wanted to learn to whistle like the birds. I told him that wasn’t my thing, and he said, “David, we have to learn to speak to the birds. They’re never going to learn how to speak to us.”