When Dr. Joe Conway submitted a paper about talking birds to a captivity narrative conference on a lark five years ago, he never expected that his work would wind up in "Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes," a collection of essays published by Fordham University Press that considers bird mimicry in literature. "This paper didn’t fit in with my other research," he says. "So when I heard about this collection, it seemed like the place to put it."