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Hope is the thing with wings6/12/2023 Over 9,000 species, the most widespread of all animals: on icebergs, in the Sahara or under the sea, at home in our gardens or flying for over a year at a time. They are evolved creatures, programmed by their DNA, adapted to a particular place or trajectory, which fulfil the destiny written in their genes through behaviour that bewitches poets and scientists alike…’- Ruth Padel In biological reality, birds are even more extraordinary. ‘But all this is just our imagination, as we plunder nature for symbols. “Hope,” Emily Dickinson writes, “is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul” – and when I hear a wren singing in the freezing cold of the early morning (how can something so small fill the backstreets of Kentish Town?), my heart does something that approximates to lifting. Children in ancient Greece welcomed the swallow as a messenger of spring. “Oh, for the wings of a dove,” says King David, so he could fly to the wilderness and be at rest. Across history, across cultures, birds are also an image of escape. The canary down the mine whose death warns miners of gas and the dove with a green twig that tells Noah the flood is receding feed into a feeling that birds are sign-bearers, omens, the gods’ messengers. It asked a crumb of me.'- Emily Dickinson Those dinosaurs with feathers and songsmiths with wings.’ ‘How diminished our world would be without birds,
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