Summer 1999, a village near a field, a clear day, a couple of clouds in the sky. I am visiting my grandmother, sitting on a bench, watching hens and chickens walk in the grass (self-grazing, the village is the same).
And then one of them begins to cluck excitedly, glancing first at the sky, then at her companions. Panic quickly spreads through the rows, and after a couple of seconds, domestic birds clumsily run to their aviary to hide there.
What? Where did the birds see the threat? The storm is coming, will there be hail? Does not look like. The day is clear, quiet and calm.
I look into the sky, peer for a long time and finally notice: high, high, a barely discernible dark silhouette flies in circles over the field. Predator.
Chickens are not at all as stupid and absent-minded as people usually think of them. While they graze in a flock in nature, a rooster or, as in this case, an "older" hen, is watching everything that happens around.
She noticed either the silhouette of the predator in the sky, or its very shadow, sliding across the grass.
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Interesting, I thought. The chicken's eyesight was so-so, all she could see was a blurry silhouette, but that was enough for, in general, justified panic.
I remember that incident. And a few years later, I found a book that mentioned the phenomenon of innate fear of the cross in birds. Not all, namely those who are most often hunted by feathered predators in nature.
The book is called “The Naughty Child of the Biosphere, by V. R. Dolnik. I recommend reading to anyone interested in ethology and psychology.
The bird's fear of the cross has nothing to do with mysticism and religion:) This is an instinctive fear honed for centuries.
The upright cross does not frighten the birds; frightening is the cross raised above the head, from above, in a horizontal plane. Because the silhouette of a bird of prey, when it circles in the sky, resembles a cross.
This is how, in the shape of a cross, thousands of years of evolution saw the winged predators of their prey - birds that spent most of their time on the ground: chickens and all their chicken relatives - pheasants, quails, turkeys.
He is not particularly picky about the details of the chicken's eyes, a silhouette is enough - two crossed sticks raised above the head to create panic: the birds nestle on the ground, hide, or run for cover.