My family seemed to speak in a constant flow of colloquialisms, which I took for fact. Among them -- if you can put salt on a bird's tail, you can catch it. I would spend hours sneaking up in birds in the backyard with a salt shaker. I was never able to get close enough so I ended up setting my mother's parakeet out to fly around the house. Whenever it landed I was right there salting its tail. Poor thing ended up panting with exhaustion trying to stay away from me and my mother was totally puzzled why there was salt all over the house. It finally did dawn on me that if your close enough to salt the tail, your close enough to grab the bird... duh!
A childhood belief about birds
