Magpies were a common sight in my childhood garden hopping around the grass and were never paid any attention. It wasn’t until I was twenty that a superstitious friend began to make me distrustful. One day, the unusual sight of a magpie sitting on the back of a sheep (like a tick bird on a rhino) was followed by news of the death of a sheep I had hand-raised. From then on I was alert to sightings.
One morning, while doing riding exercises on a friend’s horse, I saw a magpie sitting in a tree above the ring looking directly at me and then passed a dead cow carcass on the road (not unusual in a famous country as they are left outside to be picked up). A couple of days later, the horse fell on the road with its owner mounted, contracted cattle gangrene due to its injuries, and died. The vet said he hadn’t seen a horse with that in thirty years. That focused my interest in a parallel universe.
It’s not that magpies are always unlucky, although in later years a magpie crossing the road usually meant delays or accidents in the future.
The old magpie rhyme (one for sadness, two for joy, five for silver, six for gold) was flying through my head when I was selling my first flat. On Hampstead Heath, while I was walking the dog, a congregation (mischief) of magpies gathered, all six of them. Hmm, I thought and voila, the sale was made at a much better price than expected. Gold indeed.
Also on the good news front, my first sighting of a woodpecker, a shiny red, white and black dandy, coincided with the same day that an exceptional career opportunity arose.
After concentrating on the meanings of birds, I fainted when I saw green finches (= illness), and smiled with excitement when I saw herons (= new beginnings) and hawks (= fly higher, so blessings from above, except if you’re a rabbit, of course).
Three trips to St Kilda in one year, Scotland’s most north-west island and its next stop in North America, would have defeated even Asbolus. Tens of thousands of gannets, fulmars, guillemots, gulls and puffins did not awaken any messages from the beyond, although I did wonder about the meaning of being attacked by a huge great skua (known as sea pirates) while crossing their breeding range.
Back on the mainland, I embarked on a new relationship. Their first holiday together on the Isles of Scilly was ruined by the devastation of a recent storm of hurricane proportions. The second, in France, was plagued by roadkill (I’m not kidding). The roads were flooded with squashed badgers, foxes, hedgehogs and rabbits. Passing a pond in which a white and a black swan were swimming, I decided that was it: an incompatible, if not downright unfortunate, association.
Retreating to an alternative healing spa in Big Sur, California, to regain balance, the pelicans were a welcoming sight on the way down. Known as spiritual animals, they represent the overcoming of heavy emotional burdens. Which almost covered that.
There haven’t been many notable ornithological incidents in recent years, apart from a wonderful velvety brown eagle that flew low in front of my car the day I bought a house in the south of France.
Although there was a significant event in nature. A friend who was dying of cancer wanted to chase a magnificent, luminous double rainbow in the mountains so she could watch both ends disappear into the earth. I took her there and it was an impressive sight. She died shortly after. It came to mind about a year later when I saw another double rainbow. Shortly after, news broke of the death of a Hawaiian friend. His wife later told me that in their culture the rainbow bridge was the journey to a happier life on the other side.
I currently have a window in the office that looks out onto bird feeders and a garden with a flock of magpies, crows, jays, countless small birds and the occasional red kite flying overhead. And the occasional roe deer wandering around. Nothing adverse or otherworldly.
Skeptics will point to coincidences or even hallucinations in the above stories. But most people, if they are honest, will admit to events in their lives that they couldn’t explain but that seemed deeply significant.
In a way, I don’t care what the explanation is beyond accepting that the world is a stranger place than science would have us believe.
“Science is still just a candle shining in a great dark cavern.” Mario Vargas Llosa
“The theory is very good, but it does not prevent things from existing..” Freud
“The rise of modern science has brought with it a growing acceptance among intellectual elites of an image of reality that comes into sharp conflict with both everyday human experience and widely shared beliefs among the world’s great cultures..” Edward F Kelly: beyond physicalism.
“Each science has a kind of attic in which things are almost automatically pushed that cannot be used at the moment, that do not quite fit… We are constantly saving, unused, a large amount of valuable material. [which leads to] blocking scientific progress.” Kohler:
