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Recently I found another frog statue in my garden. I suppose I probably put it there once, but finding it really helped me feel better about having to take out some trees. I had been feeling slightly bad about that even though I had waited until they were in full winter dormancy and also bade them goodbye and thanked them and let them go, like I would do for any thing, living or not, that I felt had some sort of spirit and which was dead or broken or otherwise had to go.

I would not have found it if everything had gone exactly to plan. A Keystone Cops level of incompetence by a series of 4 different companies led me to be the one that had the spade in my hand that day. It was meant to be; I was meant to find it, for my personal reassurance from the spirit of the land.

We often think of deities as being less tethered to the Earth than we are, so it only makes sense that many of them have winged creatures among their symbols and iconography.

I've written about birds in Minoan art before, but from a more general perspective, looking back toward the Minoans' ancestors in Neolithic Anatolia. But a lot happened after those people migrated down to Crete and began a new life there. So let's discover which birds - and other winged creatures - are associated with which deities in Modern Minoan Paganism.

Birds abound in Minoan art: swallows (shown above in a detail from the Spring fresco from Akrotiri), doves, partridges, hoopoes, and other birds whose exact species we can't identify. I've looked before at the variety of our feathered friends who appear in the frescoes, statuary, and other Minoan art.

In Ariadne's Tribe, we associate swallows with Therasia, doves with Rhea, and larks with Korydallos. But how did the Minoans view birds, through the lens of their culture and beliefs?

Last time, we looked at some of the land animals the Minoans depicted in their art: cattle, monkeys, lions, and so on. Today, we're going to explore the Minoans' images of animals of the sky, the domain of our Sun goddess Therasia - so, essentially, birds, though I think bees also count.

Sometimes it's easy to tell which type of bird is being shown. For instance, that's a swallow flying by some lilies in the image at the top, which is a segment of the Spring fresco from Akrotiri. Here's the whole thing, with quite a few swallows:

These quarantine times give us medievalists plenty of parallels to draw: times of plague and difficulties of travel -- but the effects are the same on us. Normally I would be with my family in Scotland by this time. There I would be hearing the screams of the gulls, the occasional melodic outburst of a blackbird and the friendly croaks of my beloved magpies.

Now I lie awake in the (earlier every day) dawn light listening to a very different set of birds: sparrows galore, North American robins -- enormous athletic birds so different from the jolly European kind -- finches, wrens, catbirds, four kinds of woodpeckers including the giant pileated woodpecker whose laugh echoes often. The crows come by to eat the corn. The bluejays tend to come in a pack and chatter loudly to one another. In the morning and at dusk you can hear the turkeys gobble.

"I know the pond in which all the little children lie, waiting till the storks come to take them to their parents."

-Hans Christian Andersen, "The Storks"