Margaret Atwood in The Guardian:
How to justify the ways of men to birds? How to account for their attraction for us? (For, despite Hitchcock's frightening hunt-and-peck film, The Birds, it is mostly an attraction.) Why is Chekhov's play called “The Seagull” instead of “The Sea Slug”? Why is Yeats so keen on swans and hawks, instead of an interesting centipede or snail, or even an attractive moth? Why is it a dead albatross that is hung around the Ancient Mariner's neck as a symbol that he's been a very bad mariner, instead of, for instance, a dead clam? Why do we so immediately identify with such feathered symbols? These are some of the questions that trouble my waking hours.
For as long as we human beings can remember, we've been looking up. Over our heads went the birds – free as we were not, singing as we tried to. We gave their wings to our deities, from Inanna to winged Hermes to the dove-shaped Holy Spirit of Christianity, and their songs to our angels. We believed the birds knew things we didn't, and this made sense to us, because only they had access to the panoramic picture – the ground we walked on, but seen widely because seen from above, a vantage point we came to call “the bird's eye view”. The Norse god Odin had two ravens called Thought and Memory, who flew around the earth during the day and came back at evening to whisper into his ears everything they'd seen and heard; which was why – in the mode of governments with advanced snooping systems, or even of Google Earth – he was so very all-knowing.
More here.