I suffer from ornithophobia — the fear of birds. It is my daily affliction and eternal curse. Every time a pigeon or goose lunges towards me, I cower away from their dastardly attacks. I imagine that I can see the unbridled malice in their little, beady eyes. This fear does not stem from lived experience — although I believe that some seagulls were very close to murdering me for a sandwich in Dublin if I hadn’t fled and saved myself — but rather a propensity to fear that which is different. Birds, to me, are uncomfortably different.
Perhaps I could be an adherent of the recent “Birds Aren’t Real” movement, a satirical conspiracy theory that claims all birds have been replaced with surveillance drones since the ’70s. Although designed to mock the dangerous conspiracies animating present American politics, the salience of this movement points to a clear difference of birds from ourselves. It’s almost believable, and therefore funny, that birds aren’t real because they are so profoundly foreign.
However, in this cleavage from our avian associates, we begin to develop a sense of admiration and even reverence. These creatures are above us, literally, as they soar to heights we can never reach. To the first humans, birds likely served as early teachers, guiding them to food and water sources and marking seasonal or weather changes with their behavior. We used to look up to birds for wisdom. For the sake of nature’s angels, who individually number up to an estimated 400 billion today, I’ll briefly set aside my hatred to marvel as my dumb ancestors once did. It’s time to give birds some credit.
Birds are exceptionally smart. Many possess brains around 5% or less of chimpanzee brain size, yet they think at nearly the same level. Chicks, like humans, prefer reading increasing number lines from left to right, pigeons can learn the spellings of certain four letter words and ravens understand delayed gratification. These flying marvels, some of whom share the cognitive abilities of a primary-school child, also attempt epic pilgrimages every year for mating and feeding purposes. Spanish white storks, for instance, will make the heroic flight across the Sahara Desert every winter, at the cost of 50% to 90% of their youngest members depending on their particular migration path. While their cognition and resilience are astonishing, it is their capability for flight that has transfixed all of humanity. This is the key difference and desire demarcating us: birds fly, we cannot. They soar through the air as we can only vainly dream too — indeed, the Wright brothers took heavy inspiration from the flight mechanics of vultures and hawks to develop their first plane.
In many mythologies, birds, in their otherworldly realm of air, create the world below them. To the Ainu people of Japan, the wagtail beat away the water that covered the earth. A Hindu text, the Chandogya Upanishad, posits that the entire earth hatched from an egg, birthing mountains from its outer membrane and clouds from its inner.
Even when bound to more worldly doings, birds still act as servants of heaven. To sustain the exiled Elijah, God commands ravens to bring him food (1 Kings 17:4), while Allah calls upon swallows to stone a Yemenite siege force and save Mecca from destruction.
With such veneration, a desire for imitation begins to take root in the human psyche. We are covetous of the idiomatically free birds that surround us. Although the legend of Icarus is an instructive example of the beauty and liberation we desperately seek to draw from birds, I find the story of Alcyone and Ceyx to be a more tragic, and ultimately successful, emulation of the avian.
Struck by the death of her husband in a shipwreck — a punishment caused by Zeus for Ceyx and Alcyone imitating him and his wife Hera — Alcyone leaps across the water towards his storm-battered corpse, transforming into a kingfisher in the process so that she may fly to him. But her wings cannot hug her dead husband and her beak cannot kiss his cold lips. Pitying her grief, the gods transform Ceyx into a bird as well, and the two live peacefully as birds. The word ‘halcyonic,’ meaning tranquil or idyllic, actually originates from this legend, as the ocean was purported to remain calm for a week while the birdly Alcyone nested.
We all long, as Alcyone, to escape our worldly grief and our tender, frail human forms, to fly, not just for the exhilaration and rush of movement, but for the utter repose of unbridled freedom. Maybe I disdain the pigeons that haunt the Davis Square Red Line stop because I disdain the part of myself that envies their grimy, pigeon lives, and the tranquility they must possess. Coo.
