There is the tyranny of Jove in its claws,
and his wrath in the erectile feathers of
the head and neck.

Henry David Thoreau on the osprey
in "Natural History of Massachusetts"

Because they are able to move freely through space, to appear sud-
denly out of the sky and disappear just as suddenly, birds must have
seemed to primitive humans to be mysterious creatures command-
ing attention and worship. Their mastery of air space made them
the most apparent link between earthbound creatures and distant
wonders -- the sun, moon, stars, wind, thunder -- and the powers
that controlled them. "The wing," Socrates says in Phaedrus, "is
the corporeal element most akin to the divine" (246e). There is
hardly a pantheon in the history of world religion that does not
include birds serving as the agents and the disguises of gods, if not
the gods themselves. The earliest Hindu, Sumerian, and Egyptian
sky-gods were associated with high-flying birds such as the hawk,
eagle, and vulture, all exceptional animals in that they dared to
approach the source of all life, the sun. As late as the fifth cen-
tury B.C. it was still possible for Aristophanes to recall -- jokingly
at a time when Greece was outgrowing earlier religious beliefs --
that birds not only lived before gods were born but once ruled
over nations: the cock, king of the Persians; the kite, king over the
Greeks; and the cuckoo, king of the Egyptians and Phoenicians.

If the wing served to make the bird miraculously free of earth,
the egg bound the bird to earth, and the brooding hen became a

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