INTRODUCTION

“I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea.”—W. B. Yeats, ‘The White Birds’
 
At a pond in the forest, a bird casts off her feathered skin and becomes a woman. A man sees her bathing, falls totally in love, and hides the skin so that she will be unable to resume her avian form and fly away. She agrees to marry him. They have children, and for many years they live together in apparent happiness. One day she finds the pelt, puts it on to become a bird again and flies away. This is the basic ‘swan maiden tale’, and there are hundreds of variants throughout the world. In Scandinavian versions the wife is generally a swan, but she is a crane in tales from Japan and a dove in ones from the Near East.
 
Sometimes the genders are reversed, in which case the story is like ‘Beauty and the Beast’. There are many legends in Northern Europe of a swan knight, from whom several aristocratic houses claim to be descended. In one, Princess Beatrix of Cleves looks out over the Rhine and sees a white swan with a golden chain around its neck pulling a small boat in which stands a knight. She immediately falls in love with the knight, and they are soon married. They live happily together and have several children, but the knight warns Beatrix never to ask about his family or his origins. One day she carelessly asks him if he will eventually tell his children where he came from. He then takes leave of his family, summons his swan and boat, gets in and vanishes into the distance on the Rhine. Very probably, the knight himself was originally a swan.
 
These animal paramour tales are about the things we hide from loved ones and even from ourselves. But the main reason why such tales are so widely disseminated is that their foundation is a common experience. When looking at a swan in flight or on the water, you can momentarily feel a profound sense of intimacy with it. Then, as it disappears into the distance, you remember that you are excluded from its domain. This is what I call an ‘avian illumination’ – an intense identification of a person, or group of persons, with counterparts among birds. The difference between human being and animal begins to fall away, if only momentarily, and the person may then sadly realize that he is grounded.
 
Flight has made birds seem blessed and, in a very literal way, close to heaven. This is, in perhaps all cultures, an attribute of sages and saints. Mircea Eliade has written that the ‘ability to turn into a bird is the common property of all kinds of shamanism, not only the Turko-Mongol but also the Arctic, American, Indian, and Oceanian’. Myths and legends constantly tell of transformations of people into birds. Angels embody the human dream of becoming one with birds, not only through their wings but through the ­owing, brightly coloured robes that often extend like feathered tails behind them. They even sing like birds. In Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions angels also have assumed essentially the same role as prophetic birds in Greece and Rome, as messengers between God, or the gods, and human beings.
 
I once watched two blue jays mobbing a hawk, which was perched on a dead branch beside a stream. The hawk had no doubt invaded their territory and they probably had a nest of chicks nearby. The jays circled the raptor’s head and even dived recklessly beneath her beak, as though daring her to pounce. For a while the hawk remained completely motionless. Then she raised her wings, slowly spread them, ­flapped a few times and hurried away. After the hawk had left, the jays seemed to have disappeared as well, but then I glimpsed one a minute later passing quietly overhead. This was a drama of life and death, yet, for the birds, something that might happen any day.
 
In Melville’s Moby-Dick, the seaman Ishmael, who is the author’s alter ego, tells of seeing an albatross for the first time. The albatross had become entangled with the ropes of his ship and fallen to the deck. He writes that, ‘it uttered cries, as some King’s ghost in supernatural distress. through its inexpressible, strange eyes methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God.’ He gazed at the bird in utter amazement, lost in a reverie and unaware of how long had passed. Finally he asked a fellow sailor about the creature, to be casually told that it was not some supernatural being but a rather familiar bird.
 
The Canadian novelist Graeme Gibson saw a gyrfalcon perched high on a boulder in the Canadian Arctic suddenly descend in pursuit of a passing raven. The latter, which was slower but more agile, constantly rose, fell and twisted in the air. At times it seemed close to being caught but always managed to elude its pursuer. A second raven appeared, poised to intervene if its companion was caught, and a third one circled above. Finally, the gyrfalcon gave up and returned to its perch. The experience was, in Gibson’s words, ‘close to rapture’. Nevertheless, as Gibson explains, such events can neither be predicted nor entirely recaptured, for we are not aware of them until they are over and self-consciousness has returned. Gibson at least came away with a story of a gyrfalcon and three ravens, but sometimes there is almost nothing to tell. You have seen a pileated woodpecker and feel that the experience is special, but you cannot explain why.

Avian illuminations are often found in the work of poets, for example ‘Th‚e Windhover’ (kestrel) by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which he dedicated ‘to Christ our Lord’:
 
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rólling level underneath him steady áir, and stríding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing . . .

The sighting of a mammal or reptile – however beautiful, rare or rich in symbolism – hardly ever generates such exhilaration, which at times approaches religious ecstasy. This sense of cosmic significance is mostly unique to the human relationship with birds.
 
Not all avian illuminations are so dramatic or intense, and they may even be below the threshold of consciousness. But even a momentary identification with a bird in the wild can direct us beyond an everyday, anthropocentric perspective to reveal an exhilarating range of previously unsuspected emotional, perceptual and philosophic possibilities. Such encounters have moved people to interpret the behaviour of birds as messengers from a deity.

The bonds between human beings and birds is vastly older than either of the two parties. Their co-evolution dates back hundreds of millions of years to the point where the lineages of mammals and dinosaurs diverged. Very early mammals literally ‘looked up’ to birds, or at least their ancestors, much as we do today, though for a different reason. The dinosaurs, most of them at least, did not ­fly, but they were vastly larger than the rodent-like mammals living alongside them. Very likely, the mammals regarded the ancestors of birds with considerable fear, a bit like what a vole may feel about an owl. Ever since that time, the two groups have been constantly observing, and adapting to, one another.
 
For humankind, the story of evolution is our epic, our myth of origin. In older books of natural science it was told as a fairy tale. Man was a heroic fish climbing out of the water to colonize the land. He gradually developed legs and learned to stand upright. He domesticated fire, developed new weapons and vanquished large, powerful adversaries. Current books are more detached, more technical and more complex, yet their stories remain full of intense challenges, confl­icts and friendships.

But there is no episode in the vast epic of evolution with as much high drama as the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, when Earth was struck by a huge asteroid. No event seems more miraculous than the escape of a few dinosaurs, which had taken to the air and were well on the way to becoming birds. We have adopted the dinosaurs as surrogate ancestors. In terms of evolution, of course, that is not the case, but we show vastly more interest in dinosaurs than in our early mammalian relatives. We see ourselves as ‘dominant’, and we think the same of dinosaurs. Finally, we see the evolution of dinosaurs into birds as, in many ways, a sort of resurrection. We hope this for ourselves as well. They mirror, in summary, nearly every aspect of the way we see ourselves as human beings: powerful, vulnerable, wicked and blessed. One might say, then, that dinosaurs are the ‘parents’ of birds and the ‘foster- parents’ of human beings.