Superstitions weren’t part of my childhood so I listened
with amusement when a university friend got jittery over solo magpie sightings.
Only a decade later did two events hook me in.
Riding out exercise
one morning I saw a magpie sitting on a tree over the road and thought just as
well I’m not the impressionable sort. Along the hour’s trot, we passed a dead
calf lying by the roadside, not unusual since farmers regularly left fallen
stock out for the hunt kennels. Later that week, the horse fell on the road
with its owner (mercifully not me), was badly scraped, became ill and died. The
vet diagnosed cattle gangrene, which he said he hadn’t seen in a horse for
decades. It sent shivers down my spine but had to be a coincidence. 
Shortly after, again
riding exercise on a country road, I passed sheep grazing in a field, with a
magpie sitting on the back of one, like a tick bird on a rhinoceros. That was
unusual, leaving me with an uneasy sense of dread. Nothing untoward happened, so I wrote it off
as neurosis. A month later my university friend, by now a sheep farmer, phoned
to tell me that the pet sheep I had hand-reared the previous season in their
flock, had lambed, contracted peritonitis and died some weeks previously. She
had delayed making the call since it was upsetting news.
And so it began.
Ornithomancy, prophecy by the birds, was an unknown concept for me but a flip
through symbol encyclopaedias produced a wealth of lore, some country myths,
some from ancient Greece and Rome, where it was respected as an oracle of the
divine plan. Tiresias, the prophet was given the gift of prophecy by the birds
when he was blinded. 
Since I’m not of
peasant stock nor three thousand years old, I wasn’t tempted to share my
experiences, until one day in a fit of defiance I did mention them during a
radio interview. To my delight the Scottish Education Board wrote to me
requesting they use the transcript for an exam question. Quite what they did
with it I’ve no idea, but it obviously struck a chord. 
Over the years I’ve
continued to keep an eye out for my messages from the parallel universe.
Greenfinches for sickness. Herons for new beginnings. My first ever sighting of
a vivid black, red and white Greater Spotted Woodpecker, tapping up my garden
tree one day, came hours before I was asked to write political astrology for
the Sunday Times, which was a definite first. 
Other examples come
to mind of an ill-conceived holiday at the start of a relationship which proved
to be incompatible. The road was littered with more dead cats than I’ve seen in
my life and the clincher was seeing a pond whereupon glided one white and one
black swan. A mis-match. And it was. My recollection also is that a number of
the Queen’s swans flew into a bridge in mist and were killed, just before her
Annis Horribilis, as her children’s marriages fell apart. 
Magpies no longer
arrive with deadly intent, which is just as well since they are over-breeding
madly. But if I see one when out driving I know there’ll be a logjam or a delay
ahead. Though they are not all about bad
luck. The old magpie rhyme about seeing one for sorrow, two for joy runs on
into six for gold. And hey presto, Hampstead Heath did have a convocation of
exactly that number flaunting their showy foliage on the day I later found my
Glasgow flat had sold for considerably more than expected. And there’s no
explaining that, bar a prescient hallucination. 
Carl Jung
believed hawks were the messengers of God since they flew highest. Despite them
being voracious raptors and me not being much of a true believer in the
Almighty One, my heart always lifts when I see one. A glorious, velvety brown
eagle swooped low in front of my car on a rural track the day I bought this
present house, which seemed like a blessing. 
What to make of it
all? A world apart from the nuts n’ bolts one we live in, inhabited by the
nature gods, occasionally pulls back the veil to let us glimpse another
reality. It’s too much of a head-twister to try to make sense of it. And do you
know, I really don’t care. I watch, take note, wait for an outcome and usually
keep it to myself. Though with the passing years, I’m more relaxed about
relating the oddities of my experience and accepting my ignorance.
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Socrates
Which is why Herk,
my battle-hardened and fearless co-sleuth, who has looked into the dark abyss to
find that life isn’t all covered in a school syllabus, keeps a watchful eye out
for our feathered friends in my thriller BY the LIGHT of a LIE.
Follow me on:
BUY my new crime thriller BY the LIGHT of a LIE at:
www.marjorieorr.com
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