"That tolls
The sick man's passport in her hollow beak,
And in the shadow of the silent night
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings."
Gay, in "The Dirge," notices the presage—
"The boding raven on her cottage sat
And with hoarse croakings warn'd us of our fate."
A number of crows are said to have fluttered about Cicero's head on the very day he was murdered.
An evil prognostic attends the bittern in its flight. Bishop Hall, alluding to a superstitious man, says: "If a bittern flies over his head by night, he makes his will."
Homer has immortalized the crane as foreboding disaster—
"That when inclement winters vex the plain
With piercing frosts, or thick descending rain,
To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly,
With noise and order, through the midway sky;
To pigmy nations wounds and death they bring,
And all the war descends upon the wing."
Here is a saying that includes the magpie as a presager of death—
"One's joy, two's a greet [crying],
Three's a wedding, four's a sheet [winding sheet]."