“It’s really horrible,” her husband would say.

“Well, funny too,” his wife would insist. “Horrible and funny. Like one time I asked this little Guatemalan bird, I said, ‘Don day est tass las gran days mose cass de cab eyza?’ ”

Here her listeners would cock their heads, confused and more than a little impressed. “Wait a second, you speak that stuff?”

“Oh, I’ve picked some up,” the warbler would say in that offhand way of hers. “I mean, really, what choice do I have? I guess I’m a pretty quick study. At least I’ve been told I am.”

“She’s terrific with languages,” her husband would boast, and his wife would raise a wing in protest: “Well, not always. In this particular case, for instance, I thought I’d asked where all the big horseflies were. A reasonable question, only instead of cob ayo, which is “horse,” I said cab eyza. So what I really asked was ‘Where are all the big head flies?’ ”

Thinking that this was the end of the story, her listeners would quake with polite laughter. “Head flies, oh, that’s rich!”

“But no, wait,” the warbler would say. “So the Guatemalan bird makes a motion for me to follow him through the thicket. I do, and there in this field are, like, three hundred heads rotting in the afternoon sun. Each one with about fifty flies on it. And I mean huge, the size of bumblebees, every one of them.”

“Oh my God,” the listeners would say. “Rotting heads with flies on them?”

“Oh, they weren’t bird heads,” the warbler would reassure them. “These belonged to humans, or used to anyway. Flesh bubbling off, hair all tangled with bits of goo in it. I don’t know what they’d done with the bodies, burned them, maybe. Then they used the heads to make a wall.”

“Actually, it was more like a counter,” her husband would say.