Can Birds Predict the Future? Avian Divination Traditions See a Revival

In a new oracle deck, the birds have a lot to tell us. Pull the Hummingbird card and you’ll be guided to slow down to appreciate the simple things, like burying your nose in a flower or taking a walk in a public garden. If you pull the Hawk instead, it’s a sign that you might be too close to a situation, and need to take a step back to get a better view. Meanwhile, the Starling reminds you to communicate with thoughtfulness and clarity.

Much like the related practice of tarot, oracle decks have long been used for divine guidance, deeper reflection, and spiritual insight. Pick out a card from the deck, and it’ll reveal what you need to know most at that moment. Traditionally associated with mystical or occult practices, such decks are gaining popularity in the mainstream. By 2027, tarot and oracle decks are projected to become a $93 million industry worldwide. 

The Spiritual Meaning of Birds, an oracle deck released in May, delivers these takeaways through familiar birds, depicted using the illustrations of John James Audubon. “I think it’s undeniable that people find birds fascinating and meaningful,” says the deck’s creator, Arin Murphy-Hiscock, author of the popular Green Witch series and a third-degree Wiccan High Priestess in the Black Forest Clan. 

Over the years, a number of decks have used birds to convey spiritual messages and featured them in a range of styles: cheerful species portraits on boldly colored backgrounds, delicate watercolors of close-up feathers, intricate collage-like illustrations of birds both real and mythological. Like Hiscock’s creation, many of these decks blend bird observation with age-old tradition and folklore to inform their symbolism. There’s plenty for them to draw on. Cultures from all over the world have long looked at birds as messengers from another realm and interpreted their behavior as omens of future events, as a wealth of artifacts has shown.

This past July, archeologists unearthed a tablet from Bronze Age Anatolia—what is now Central Turkey—that describes the divinatory flight patterns of birds. Clay tablets traced to Ancient Egypt convey a request for the king of Egypt to send officials to help interpret signs from Eurasian Griffon vultures. Texts from 11th century Tibet also spoke of deciphering messages from the sounds of crows and ravens.

Some of the most detailed records of bird divination—sometimes referred to as ornithomancy or augury—come from ancient Greece and, later, Rome. Said to be influenced by the Etruscans, these cultures used divination as an institutional practice. Before official actions like war campaigns, elections, and the passing of new laws, Romans looked for auspices or signs to determine whether the Gods favored it or not. 

“It was fascinating to think that the random movements of a flock of birds could determine the course of an empire,” says Ashleigh Green, author of Birds in Roman Life and Myth. Green, a classics lecturer at the University of Melbourne, explains that Romans treated bird divination as a formal science with strict rules: “No mysticism was allowed.”

Every military camp, as well as the city of Rome, had a sacred space known as a templum. During a ceremony, a religious official called an augur would mark out a quadrant of the sky and interpret any birds that entered this space as a potential sign. Birds approaching from the right signaled a favorable omen; from the left, an unfavorable one. Typically eagles, vultures, crows, ravens, and woodpeckers were the most significant messengers.

But waiting for signs eventually posed a problem with generals who wanted to take swifter action, Green says. This led to the use of sacred chickens whose eating habits would reveal the will of the Gods. If the birds dined voraciously, it was a positive omen. If they refused to come out of cages, didn’t eat, cried, or flew away, it meant divine disapproval.

By the 2nd century, Roman bird divination declined due to rising skepticism and condemnation by the Christian church. However, other cultures have maintained similar practices to this day. In Guatemala, the Indigenous Ch’Orti’ Maya look to birds to convey omens of love, sickness, death, and weather events. West African Yoruba traditions associate different bird species with specific deities and use their songs to decipher messages from the spiritual realm. 

These long-held traditions are also at risk from environmental impacts stemming from colonization. The Sediq and Truku tribes in Taiwan have long revered the sisil—a tiny bird also known as the Grey-cheeked Fulvetta—as a messenger from the ancestors and a bird oracle. But urban development has fractured forest habitats, threatening both the birds’ survival and the tribes’ connection to them.

Searching for meaning through tools like divination is part of human nature, says Maria Popova, writer and founder of the website The Marginalian. Though she was initially skeptical of practices like tarot, Popova came to see these traditions as a way to deal with the uncertainty of living—more about making sense of the present than predicting the future. “I think everyone does what they can do to bear their own life,” she says.

In July, she published her own avian oracle deck, An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, featuring 19th-century bird illustrations by John James Audubon, John Gould, and Charles Darwin. Rather than draw on established spiritual symbolism, Popova took a literary approach. She created each card by cutting and rearranging passages from Audubon’s Birds of America into a collage of words. The goal is to inspire people to think beyond their own experience—to “unself,” as she puts it—and reflect on the shared condition of being alive. “Everything I do is trying to unself and connect to this larger way of being, larger awareness of reality,” Popova says. 

Murphy-Hiscock also hopes to invite reflection and self-examination, as well as to encourage people to create their own meanings from the birds in their personal environment. “I think divination should be a very open-ended practice, where people can learn more about themselves,” she says, adding that the cards meanings’ are just the beginning. Spotting a hummingbird, a hawk, or a starling in the wild can become an opportunity for each person to tune their intuition—and find a message uniquely their own.