Let’s be honest here. Bird Signs may technically be an A7 mini-book, but the less technical description is ‘an A4 piece of rather nice paper folded up with two pieces of card stuck on the outside, slipped inside a cellophane bag.’ If you really can’t live without one, they may be purchased for £5 plus postage from Folksy by clicking on this link. https://folksy.com/items/8238150-Bird-Signs

If you’re wondering what on earth it is… Star signs don’t interest birds very much as, for example, most British birds are ‘born’ between May and July which makes for pretty boring late-night conversations about star signs as all of them are Taurus, Gemini or Cancer. They instead use a very complex system involving the time and date that an egg was laid, when it hatched and when the chick fledged. This is way too complicated to go into here (and frankly dull). What really fascinates birds, however, is the fact that humans can be born in any month of the year. Birds claim to be able to correctly identify in which month of the year any individual human was born just through careful observaton of their behaviur. It was a very short step from there to them matching up the behaviour of each of the ’12 months of human’ to 12 birds. Here I have tried to explain what it means when one bird nods at a human and says ‘blackbird’ to his mate. Clearly this system is full of nuance, tradition and insult that I cannot hope to properly convey, and we have to remember that birds are dreadful liars anyway. I would like to add, though, may we all aspire to be wrens.