“Last year I was driving with a buddy to go fishing and carrying on a discussion. As he drove, a hawk hit the side of the car and smashed into the frame between the windshield and the driver’s side window. It looked like a suicide—the thing dived directly for him. I intimated that this was a bad sign but he didn’t seem phased by it. So do you think this was a bird sign and what do you think in general of such things?”

-Durango

…

[Durango also related a cougar attack on a friend that seemed to have similar elements. ]

Durango, myth and history does suggest that there are extra human intelligences who contact certain humans via living creature and elemental forms.

Apollo and Odin observed and signed to humans through avian intermediaries. The Iliad and the Argonautica both have characters who are seers and reed bird signs. This may simply be a folk memory of practical uses of birds to predict weather changes, to note disease which is often shared and to spot a distant fatality.

When the plandemic kicked off while I was in Portland in March of this year, I noticed that the crows drastically changed their living and flocking patterns as human activity also changed.

The birds that gather in the wake of a battle or some other form of large scale death, are they observers for the higher plane—avatars, are they escorts as some ancient believed, or are they just hungry? Perhaps they are all three and more.

I find myself paying attention to the behavior of birds, their appetite, a change in wintering and roosting patterns, in urban and rural locations.

Perhaps such off behavior as the hawk crashing into the car might simply be a condition of the bird’s health being negatively affected by the changing magnetic fields in the outset of this grand solar minimum.

Perhaps, birds, having such great vantage over us, are disturbed by our crazed behavior, poisoned by our burning cities and arson, or are being disturbed by something we as yet cannot perceive.

Perhaps the thrush on the rock in the Hobbit is a residual of this ancient idea—note the importance of winged things in all of Tolkien’s work: ravens, eagles, dragons and evil winged steeds.

Perhaps you and your friend conversing attracted attention.

Perhaps, as I see you read this site, you are an alienated person, a shamanic type who occupied the spiritual and mental space between the social narrative, that is the woven lie of control, and the rarely glimpsed truth?

Enkidu was terrorized in a prophet dream by a winged monster and Noah was contacted by a bird after the deluge.

Are such signs as simple as the canary in the coal mine, or are they real messengers from beyond?

In Gene Wolfe’s Litany of the Long Sun, the protagonist, a troubled priest is informed by raven, a bird who lent its name to The Sacred Ravens, or Absaroka, a people we call The Crow. Amerindian attention to winged creatures such as thunderbirds and the quetzal, as portending coming change echoes in my mind when I read the Aeneid and the Argonautica and in which swans figure portentously and in which ships are likened to birds. And what is a ship to a pre-industrial people in times of natural and social change, but a migratory device?

From the Argo to the Dragonship and the Age of Sail tradition of feminizing the ship as a gestational vessel of hope, the subtext of our myth and history links the actions of birds to our collective fate.

I do not know.

I have no faith—being too damned curious.

But I would not take lightly the beliefs of most of those wise people who have lived, people respected enough by their folk to imprint the idea that birds have something to tell us.