Responding to an article in which birds comforted Helen Harris during bereavement, Angela Smith describes her own experience
Helen Harris’s experience (A moment that changed me: my husband died – and birds began behaving strangely towards me, 19 August) chimes with that of a friend of mine who had many close encounters with robins after the death of her father. She too had birds flying into her house as never before but, unlike Helen, she believed that this was the person’s spirit making contact.
My own association between birds and death is rather different. The day my mother-in-law died, a wren had flown into the window of the classroom where I taught, and I found it dead on the ground outside. When we took her ashes to be scattered in the sea, a pheasant hit the car windscreen and died.
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