I Am So Tired Of Birds Being Treated as Metaphors

I regularly scan newly published books for anything related to birds. Basically, I just search the titles for – you guessed it – the word “bird”.

A random search right now brought these ten as the first entries:

• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (a novel)
• A Guide to the Birds of East Africa (a novel, despite its title)
• An Odd Bird – Of the Wing Book 1 (presumably a children’s book)
• Each Little Bird that Sings (another children’s book, I think)
• Birds at Rest: The Behavior and Ecology of Avian Sleep (nonfiction/science)
• Homeless Bird (another novel)
• The Alphabet of Birds (stories)
• Bird (a novel)
• The Linnet Bird (a novel)
• Pretty Bird (historical fiction)

You may notice that only one (10%) out of the ten books is actually about birds. In the other nine books (and no, I have not actually checked this in detail – it would take more than writing a blog post for me to slog through a historical novel named “Pretty Bird”), the poor birds are just metaphors standing in for god-knows-what. And I am pretty sure they are as sick of this as I am.

So, what exactly do the birds misrepresent when they are not seen as the real animals that they are? And why don’t they get royalties for this service to unimaginative humans?

1. Freedom. Yes, free as a bird – unless you live in a cage in Indonesia, have to migrate, have to avoid predators, have to find food, or have to deal with four screaming chicks.
   
2. Peace. I blame Picasso, among others (the dove). Each winter, I put some bird feed at a specific location in a Shanghai park. And every winter, one Red-flanked Bluetail spends 90% of its time chasing away the other bluetails, no matter how much food I put there. Birds are no better representation of peace than Benjamin Netanyahu.
   
3. Love. Yes, a few bird species mate for life (unless one of them gets killed – evolution does not hand out rewards to celibate widows and widowers). But most do not. Most species only pair up for one season, and many species are promiscuous as well. Male birds of many species spend a lot of time mate-guarding to reduce infidelity when they would much rather relax with a beer.
   
4. Joy. Yes, birds sing because they enjoy life – except that this is not the reason for their singing at all. Birds sing to claim territory, attract mates, coordinate behavior, and to be identified as individuals. Maybe there are other functions as well – but the expression of joy of being alive it not one of them.
   
5. Spirituality. While you might think that the shadow you see flying near your house at night is the spirit of deceased aunt Edna, in reality, it is a Barn Owl looking for rodents.
   
6. Innocence. Don’t be fooled by splendidly white birds or cute chicks. In many raptors, older nestlings routinely kill their younger siblings – a paper hints at the rationale (“On the selective advantage of fratricide in raptors“). Hoopoe mothers routinely feed their youngest chick to the older ones (source) – and it is hard to sell cannibalism as innocence. And moorhens may kill their own chicks in order to whittle down a large brood, or in times of food shortage, drowning them by violently shaking them and pushing them underwater (source).
   
7. Beauty. I’d be the first to admit that their beauty is probably what attracts me most to birds. But why this beauty? It helps to look at human beauty contests. Miss World is not actually interested in being beautiful – she wants to get rich, famous, and maybe find a partner who ideally is equally rich and attractive. Pretty much the same applies to birds if the “rich and famous” is replaced by what counts for status among birds – control of a high-quality territory.
   
8. Hope. According to ChatGPT, which I asked because I did not want to read the book myself, “In ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’, the caged bird sings as an act of hope, resilience, and a longing for freedom. Anthropomorphizing at its worst, leaving me with very limited hope for mankind, and a longing for birds just to be taken as birds, not as flying metaphors.

Photo: Common Moorhen chick

For birdwatching (not birds) as a metaphor, see this great post by Mathias Kom.