Birds

may not even birds follow those enemies in any direction.

The seer, dear to heaven, placed among the grandchildren's birds, goes forth with his sounds, the one of bold resolve.

The golden-winged bird, messenger of Varuṇa, the restless bird in the womb of Yama.

One may indeed see that the eggs of birds that have undergone such purifications, if warmed, are still quickened into life;

"And many birds beneath the sun's rays go to and fro.

And they say that birds too have the most pleasant quality of flesh when, no plentiful food being set before them, they themselves, scratching with their feet, pick out their food with toil.

But birds that make their nests near one another do not plot against one another, nor quarrel over food and twigs;

Therefore, doing nothing else but being gazed at, like the owls, we gather a great crowd of birds in very truth—being ourselves foolish and molested by others such as we.

we see in a certain kind of birds some signs of natural affection, recognition, memory;

But flee the divers tribes of birds and vex

With sudden wings by night the groves of gods,

When in their gentle slumbers they have dreamed

Trusting in them, as augurs trust in birds, the many judge that pleasures are the greatest blessings in life, and they imagine that the lusts of beasts are better witnesses than are the aspirations and thoughts inspired by the philosophic muse.

And the hunting of winged creatures is called, as a whole, fowling.

And the tribe of birds are derived by transformation, growing feathers in place of hair, from men who are harmless but light-minded —men, too, who, being students of the worlds above, suppose in their simplicity that the most solid proofs about such matters are obtained by the sense of sight.

A bird's feather clothes it, the animal's tooth is hers — bound with cow's sinew she flies when launched;

All the cities are stirred up in hostility, whose mangled corpses the dogs, or the wild beasts or some winged bird buried, carrying an unholy stench to the city that held each man’s hearth.

As I took my place on my old seat of augury where all birds regularly gather for me, I heard an unintelligible voice among them:

For the altars of our city and our hearths have one and all been tainted by the birds and dogs with the carrion taken from the sadly fallen son of Oedipus.

For you used to get up in the coldest winter weather and go out before daylight to catch birds, and before the birds were astir you had your snares laid ready for them and the ground disturbed had been made exactly like the ground undisturbed;