Lists

10 Birds in World Literature

January 22, 2026 by Kai Pflug No Comments

I have no real idea why anybody would want to write a post with the title above. Yet once that idea had settled into my brain, there was no way around working on it.

And it turned out to be surprisingly difficult. One would have thought finding examples is easy enough – works of world literature with a specific bird in the title. It is not.

In particular, some birds that almost cry for incorporation into book titles – say, eagles, or penguins – almost do not feature at all. Still, I finally got a list:

  1. Albatross (Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
  2. Mockingbird (Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird)
  3. Vulture (Franz Kafka – The Vulture)
  4. Seagull (Anton Chekhov – The Seagull)
  5. Cuckoo (Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
  6. Raven (Edgar Allan Poe – The Raven)
  7. Swan (W. B. Yeats – Leda and the Swan)
  8. Duck (Henrik Ibsen – The Wild Duck)
  9. Eagle (Alfred, Lord Tennyson – The Eagle)
  10. Skylark (Percy Bysshe Shelley – To a Skylark)

And I know, I am cheating a bit as the first entry does not have the albatross in its title – but that one is too good to leave out, and the alternative would have been to add Paul Gallico’s “Snow Goose” to the list, which is a truly terrible novella. Better to cheat.

So, what do all these birds stand for in the human world (note: humans generally do not care too much for birds, so they use them as symbols for this and that, rather than as stand-alone creatures)?

I did not want to spend a day figuring this out, so instead, I asked ChatGPT to give me three buzzwords for each work:

  • Albatross – Guilt, fate, and the burden of conscience (Coleridge).
  • Mockingbird – Innocence, moral conscience, and justice (Harper Lee).
  • Vulture – Menace, oppression, and existential dread (Kafka).
  • Seagull – Artistic aspiration, desire, and mortality (Chekhov).
  • Cuckoo – Madness, societal confinement, and rebellion (Kesey).
  • Raven – Loss, grief, and the supernatural (Poe).
  • Swan – Divine power, transformation, and beauty (Yeats).
  • Duck – Illusion, hidden truths, and consequences of idealism (Ibsen).
  • Eagle – Majesty, authority, and symbolic power (Tennyson).
  • Skylark – Joy, inspiration, and the transcendence of nature (Shelley).

So, what does that show us?

That birds can stand for pretty much anything – from joy to grief, from guilt to innocence, from existential dread to inspiration, from mortality to divine power.

Somehow, I had expected more from this post than discovering that birds are literary Swiss Army knives.

Illustration: Detail from Gustav Doré’s engraving of The Rime of The Ancient Mariner

Written by Kai Pflug
Kai has lived in Shanghai for 22 years. He only started birding after moving to China, so he is far more familiar with Chinese birds than the ones back in his native Germany. As a birder, he considers himself strictly average and tries to make up for it with photography, which he shares on a separate website. Alas, most of the photos are pretty average as well. He hopes that few clients of his consulting firm—focused on China’s chemical industry—ever find this blog, as it might raise questions about his professional priorities. Much of his time is spent either editing posts for 10,000 Birds or cleaning the litter boxes of his numerous indoor cats. He occasionally considers writing a piece comparing the two activities.