Can a Bird and Its Nest Really Bring Bad Luck?

This is A Modern Guide to Superstition, a column by Dorothy Bendel on folk belief and ritual in chaotic times.

Pop didn’t have much hair left by the ’90s, but the strands that trailed down the back of his neck made him twitch. I hated to see him uncomfortable, so I rolled him in his wheelchair to the shady spot near the garage door for a haircut. Shady spots in the South are sacred, even in spring, when the weather serves as a preview of the suffocating heat to come. My grandfather would stare at the cloudless sky while I locked the back wheels. A World War II veteran once charged with spotting incoming aircraft, Pop could name the model of each airplane that flew overhead. Sitting outside with his binoculars trained on the sky was one of his favorite pastimes. After his stroke, he couldn’t hold the binoculars up to his eyes anymore, so I held them up for him whenever we could steal away in the early morning hours.

We lived in one of those Florida neighborhoods where buyers choose one of three or four designs to have a modest home built on a flat, desolate square of land. Ours was near a runoff canal where alligators groaned at night, as if to say they, too, were unhappy to be there. My high school friends had trouble finding my house because they all looked the same, like the surreal pink-and-cotton-candy-blue neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands. My grandparents were thrilled they could have a new house built after they retired and sold their house on Long Island, where I once lived too. The old house needed work, but the difference in real estate markets meant it was worth enough to net a cookie-cutter house in a Space Coast town. There was nothing much to do, but every now and then a space shuttle would bolt through the sky from the nearby Kennedy Space Center, sonic booms cracking through the atmosphere to remind us that there were worlds beyond our little town waiting to be discovered.

It was so hot most of the year that it seemed everybody was living in a kind of lockdown in their air-conditioned homes. Neighbors popped out only to engage in the endless task of watering and mowing their pristine lawns. This was decades before “lockdown” signaled something more treacherous. At least the humidity wouldn’t kill you if you carried a bottle full of ice water; no masks required. I hurried to start cutting Pop’s hair so he wouldn’t be outside too long, exposed to soaring temperatures and ravenous mosquitos. His head still craned upward, I guided his chin back toward his chest.

Within minutes, my grandmother appeared, shouting, “You shouldn’t cut his hair outside! If a bird steals his hair and makes a nest with it, he’ll have bad luck for seven years!”

It seemed that Pop’s luck had already taken a turn; he had suffered a major stroke from which he would never fully recover. I told my grandmother that I would be sure to fight off any birds attempting to swipe sheared bits of Pop’s hair and sweep up every last strand when I was done. But I could see that my joking assurances weren’t enough. Her face tightened as she turned back into the house, mumbling, “No one ever listens to me.”

I used to wonder if my grandmother had made up the idea of birds and hair and bad luck all on her own. But when I looked into it, I found variations of the superstition from at least a hundred years ago. Birds have a long history of otherworldly powers, usually malevolent, and are often viewed as harbingers of evil. If a bird flies into a house, it is a sign that a member of the household will die. Albatrosses can be bad omens for sailors, and to kill one means certain doom as they are the keepers of drowned sailors’ souls. Owls are said to signal that evil is close. Birds are frequently described as devious thieves in folktales. In Greek mythology, they are messengers from the gods, flying between our world and the spirit world. Their migratory patterns make them suspect, rather like my great-grandparents—who migrated from Italy, Ireland, and Poland and landed at Ellis Island.

People are often suspicious of what they don’t understand and quick to attribute what they don’t know to dubious concepts. The idea of luck can serve as a placeholder when we’re desperate for an answer for why bad things happen. An occurrence is deemed “bad luck” because, for some, having no clear answer is less comfortable than maintaining some magical belief.

My grandmother wanted clear answers when she sat alone in her kitchen and asked why it should be that Pop endured such terrible ailments through the last decade of his life. At the end, he didn’t know who any of us were. Why did this happen to him?

I asked that same question when my partner was diagnosed with a form of blood cancer in his thirties. Friends and acquaintances offered unsolicited advice—he should be eating more of one food or less of another, they insisted. It’s scarier to acknowledge that many illnesses occur without us knowing the cause. I read medical journals and studies, trying to find answers, but ultimately found only hypotheses.

If my grandmother were still alive, she might imagine a bird feeding her chicks in a nest somewhere high up in a tree. Under the chicks’ fuzzy bodies, their mouths gaping and begging for food, my partner’s dark hair keeps them warm at night. “Bad luck,” I can hear my grandmother whispering.

Some view luck as a character trait. You might be lucky or unlucky, blessed or cursed. For some, good luck or bad luck makes up who we are at birth, though our luck might change if a winged creature steals a strand of our hair for its own purposes.

My grandmother couldn’t protect Pop with masks or hand sanitizer. She had nothing to hold onto but the superstitions passed down to her.

In some versions of the bird’s-nest superstition, the bad luck one experiences if a bird makes off with their hair is more specific. Instead of vague damnation, the victim is cursed with headaches. The headaches might last for three years, seven years, until the nest ceases to exist, or for the rest of the cursed one’s life. I remembered the alleged curse last year when I experienced the worst migraines of my life. I’ve lived with migraines since I was sixteen years old, but they came and went in spurts, lasting a day or two. Last year, one attack stretched into weeks of searing pain, treated with a cornucopia of medications. Many medications prescribed to migraine sufferers were created to treat other illnesses, like epilepsy and high blood pressure, because doctors still don’t fully understand migraines. Nothing worked.

“Unlucky,” my grandmother sighs.

Seeing a doctor in person means risking infection. My medical appointments were all conducted over the phone during various phases of Covid-19 restrictions and lockdowns. My partner, however, has little choice. His treatment requires two CT scans each year to ensure that his meds are working and the tumors haven’t returned. He must also travel overseas for checkups and bloodwork, a terrifying prospect when close proximity to other people could mean infection. Each time, I check that he’s packed three times as many masks as he’ll need, a face shield, and hand sanitizer. I pack a fresh pillowcase to replace the one in the hotel where he’ll stay near the hospital, to create a nest where he’ll be safe.

One day, as I check his bag for the third time, I recall rolling my eyes when my grandmother warned of birds stealing hair and causing bad luck. My face floods with heat; I’m embarrassed by my reaction, for not trying to understand her. My grandmother couldn’t protect Pop with masks or hand sanitizer. She had nothing to hold on to but the superstitions passed down to her.

When he boards the plane, my partner sends me a photo of himself wearing a mask and face shield. He sends me constant messages so I can chart his every move. He knows that I worry. I imagine the danger his immunocompromised body could be susceptible to at any moment: an unmasked passenger standing too close to him in the airport queue; infected patients in the hospital waiting room. Along with these vividly imagined scenarios, rising infection rates have catapulted me into the extreme present, the precise configuration of place and time from one minute to the next. I’m acutely aware of how far apart I am from others on the rare occasion that I leave home and mingle with the outside world. I know exactly how long I spend inside the pharmacy to collect my next new prescription. I dart in and out of supermarkets like a sly bird traveling between the realms of life and death.

Once, I tried to be sly when Pop was due for a haircut. I waited until I thought my grandmother had entered a deep sleep in her recliner before moving him outside. Pop looked up at the wispy clouds rushing east. The air shifted; the atmospheric pressure dropped. I cut his hair quickly, not because of the heat, but because I knew a storm was coming toward us. “Almost done, Pop.”

The wind picked up, sweeping his fallen silver hair over my shoes. He made a noise that sounded like a garbled “Ha!” I couldn’t make out what he was trying to tell me over the moaning wind. I couldn’t hear my grandmother shouting from the doorway, or the lawn mowers that were forever roaring out of sight. I couldn’t hear the birds.

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