Birds as moral teachers: hospitality, care for parents, poverty, and providence

Who defined the laws of hospitality among them? Who threatened them with a charge of desertion, so that not one of them fails to join the escort? Let the inhospitable listen—those who shut their doors and do not even share a roof with travelers in winter and at night. The care storks show for their aged parents would be enough to make our children lovers of their fathers, if they were willing to pay attention. For surely no one is so lacking in understanding as to think it not worthy of shame to fall behind the most irrational birds in virtue. When the father has shed his feathers from old age, they stand around him in a circle and warm him with their own feathers, and they provide food in abundance, and they give him all the help they can in flight, gently lifting him on either side with their wings. And this is so widely celebrated that some people already call the repayment of benefits 'antipelargosis.' Let no one lament poverty; let no one despair of his life who has left no wealth at home, when he looks at the swallow's ingenuity. For when she builds her nest, she carries the twigs in her mouth; and since she cannot lift mud with her feet, she wets the tips of her wings with water, then rolls them in the finest dust, and in this way she devises the use of mud. And little by little she binds the twigs together with the mud as with a kind of glue, and in it she raises her young. If someone pierces out their eyes, she has a certain healing remedy from nature, through which she restores the sight of her offspring to health. Let these things admonish you not to turn to wickedness because of poverty, and not to cast away all hope in the most grievous sufferings and lie idle and inactive, but to flee to God—who, if he grants such great things to the swallow, how much greater things will he give to those who call upon him from a whole heart? The halcyon is a sea bird. It naturally nests on the very shores, laying its eggs on the sand itself; and it nests around the middle of winter, when the sea is dashed against the land by many violent winds. But nevertheless all the winds are lulled to sleep, and the sea wave is still, whenever the halcyon broods for the seven days. For in only so many days it hatches out its young. And since they also need food, the God who gives great gifts granted another seven days to the smallest creature for the growth of the young. So all sailors know this, and they call those days the halcyon days. These things have been ordained for you as an encouragement to ask God for the things that lead to salvation, through God's providence for the irrational creatures. What paradoxical thing would not happen for your sake, you who have been made according to the image of God, when for the sake of so small a bird the great and fearful sea is held back, commanded to keep calm in the middle of winter? 8.6 They say that the turtledove, once separated from her mate, no longer accepts union with another, but remains unpaired, refusing union with another out of memory of the one to whom she was once joined. Let women hear how the dignity of widowhood is preferred, even among irrational creatures, to the indecency of polygamy. The eagle is most unjust in the rearing of its young. For when it has brought out two chicks, it dashes one of them down to the ground, thrusting it away with blows of its wings; and taking up only the other one, it makes it its own, rejecting the one it begat because of the painful toil of feeding.