Viking editor Rick Kot is a parrot lover (in a 12-year relationship with Louise, an African Grey), so was an eager buyer for a book on the relationship between man and talking bird. It's Birds of a Different Feather, by bird expert, bird club founder, journalist, TV producer and author Mira Tweti. Her book traces that relationship through history and the world, examining some of the "sometimes funny, always fascinating and sometimes catastrophic collisions of parrots and people," as the book's subtitle has it. Kot paid six figures for North American rights to agent Jandy Nelson at Manus & Associates on the Coast. (Did you know that parrots score as high as five-year-old kids on IQ tests?)