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Ravenous and bird-brained
It?s the presence of certain birds ? rather than their absence ? that has been construed as a portent of things to come.
It’s the presence of certain birds — rather than their absence — that has been construed as a portent of things to come. In the sequel to the classic horror film, Omen, the devil-possessed child is helped in his impish endeavours by a coal black raven. In Edgar Allan Poe’s chiller of a poem, The Raven, the messenger bird comes “from the night’s plutonian shore” — and that’s clearly not a sunny address.
Hitchcock, in his classy shock-classic, The Birds, doesn’t even confine the messengers of bad news to only black-winged species, but expands the canvas by creating hordes of fiendishly crazed birds of all kinds pecking out eyes and other body parts. Less blatantly, the opening credits of the Western Mackenna’s Gold points to the death that lies in the desert with vultures circling in the sky while José Feliciano croons the tune Old Turkey Buzzard. So in a sort of reversal of classic symbolism, we have the news that the seven ravens housed in the precincts of the Tower of London have been moved indoors so as to avoid the fall of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Fearing that the birds may contract avian flu, the authorities have decided to take no chances.
The legend of Tower ravens has its source in the reign of Charles II when the astronomer of the Royal Observatory complained that too many birds were coming in the way of his observations. Charles decreed that the birds be killed, but a Carolingian Maneka Gandhi intervened, convincing the king (understandably nervous as his father’s head had been lopped off by revolutionaries) that at least six birds had to remain in the Tower. Far from London in Calcutta, there’s a superstition that seeing two thrushes is a good sign, while seeing one brings bad luck. One doesn’t have to be an Australian kookaburra to know how many thrushes Sourav Ganguly woke up one morning to see from his Behala window.
