on human-avian relationships

2021 FALCONER, Delia, 

"Birds" from Signs and Wonders

Birds have always been small agents charged with carrying the burden of our feelings simply by following the logic of their own existence

2021 FALCONER, Delia, 

"Birds" from Signs and Wonders

We have even been inclined, right up until the present, to imagine birds as the souls of our recently departed returned to us. 

2021 FALCONER, Delia, 

"Birds" from Signs and Wonders

Over the last century folklorists and psychoanalysts have kept trying to account for birds' deep hold over our imaginations; as agents of death, prophets, ferriers of souls, omens, and symbols of renewal and productivity. Some attribute it to the power of flight and their ability to inhabit the heavens, others to the way eggs embody transformation. But could it be that the vestigal shrew-like part of ourselves has always recognised them instinctively as the emissaries of a deep past, much older than we are? 

2021 BERRY, Vanessa,

"Fly Away Bird" from Gentle and Fierce

That birds can be interpreted as omens with the ablity to communicate between human and spirit worlds, is an idea that has existed across eras and Cutlures, and is borne out in daily encounters. Birds behave according to impulses external to humans, but their communicative habits can be readily filtered through human ways of thinking. As the magpies sang to me on the rocks above the ocean I translated it according to my yearnings, as a message of joy: all is well! all is well!

2021 BERRY, Vanessa, 

"Fly Away Bird" from Gentle and Fierce

My magpies sang for good with me on the Maroubra headland that day. When their song ended and they flew away I decided that I was going to accept all the signs as they appeared. What did it matter if I believed Helen spoke to me through the details of the world around me. It was a private relationship, suggesting sympathetic energies btween surface details and other, unseen forces. Since that day magpies have been my surrogates for the friend I can no longer have by my side.

Sometimes the magpies seem to deliver a message, but often they are just there beside me, observing and listening to whatever passes through their domain. 

2021 BERRY, Vanessa, 

"Fly Away Bird" from Gentle and Fierce

Helen had an affinity with birds and often greeted them, whistling two descending notes between her teeth. When we were together she'd sometimes interrupt a sentence this way, having heard a bird call out nearby, as if she was conducting two conversations at once. For a time she wrote me messages about the baby magpies that came to visit her in her garden, birds she had nicknamed Doogle and MacGoogle. As I recoverd from the initial wave of grief after her death, this was the Helen I tried to imagine in my mind's eye