Cupid has gone down in history as a winged child-god: seductive, deceitful, and malevolent, he shoots poisoned arrows that have the power to awaken desire and love in the recipient, until he himself is wounded by his own weapon and goes mad for the young Psyche. "Cupid is also known by the name of Eros, and the love he represents has a double connotation, that of sweetness and that of bitterness: we desire what we cannot catch, what appears and disappears, like a bird that flies across the sky." explains writer and editor Elisabet Riera (Barcelona, ​​​​1973), who has just published one of the most unique books of this fall, The winged ones (Malas Hierbas / Siruela, 2025), where birds, angels, gods, monsters, and other flying creatures continue to be represented as they have been for centuries of cultural history.

When the holidays are over and routine begins to set in, that bitter feeling of farewell often appears. But some have found a different way to extend the summer: looking up and being amazed by the birds crossing the sky. What once seemed like a hobby Reserved for ornithologists with notebooks and binoculars, it can be a leisure activity accessible to all audiences. And the last days of August and the beginning of September are ideal for delving into this world.

An Iberia flight operating between Madrid and Paris was forced to make an emergency landing at Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport on Sunday afternoon following the impact of a large bird just minutes after takeoff. Both the passengers and crew of flight IB579 were unharmed, according to company and air traffic control sources.

As mammals, we're not surprised that parallels are often drawn between humans and certain species, or that we often draw on the similarities between some of primate behavior and our own. But perhaps we're more surprised to consider that we are much more like birds than we think, and how the behavior of some specimens can be a reflection of our attitudes. This is the thesis supported by ornithologist Noah Strycker, one of the world's leading experts on birds who, in addition to showing us their daily lives in a fascinating and captivating way, has used his years of study to focus on everything birds tell us about humans.

In Catalonia, there are seventeen garbage dumps or supplementary feeding points (SFPs) for carrion or necrophagous birds. These are authorized and regulated spaces where, subject to a series of requirements, meat by-products not intended for human consumption from slaughterhouses, such as lamb, sheep, or goat feet, can be left. Each of these contributions must be traceable, recorded, and strictly monitored. Thanks to these dumps, some necrophagous birds, such as the griffon vulture, have been able to recover, and others, which are still vulnerable or directly in danger of extinction, such as the bearded vulture, the Egyptian vulture, the black vulture, and the red kite, are on the way to recovery.

The noise of parrots is no longer strange or exotic-sounding in the most populated areas of Catalonia, although 40 years ago they were an anecdote in the midst of the usual sparrows or serins. The list of newly arrived birds in the last decades is quite long –there are 17– and exotic birds have had a lot to do with it because they make up to half of the novelties detected by the third Atlas of nesting birds in Catalonia, a project led by the Institut Català d'Ornitologia (ICO), which is the most comprehensive study ever made of the birds that inhabit Catalonia. In view of the overall numbers, things have not gone badly for birds: it is estimated that between 8 and 12 million pairs of birds breed each year and the 233 species that can be found in some corner of the country are a very broad representation (39%) of Europe's bird wildlife.