Raised by birds (Or: Flying with the bone mothers: the curious story of the girl with a bird in her mouth)

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Hilevaara, Katja and Orley, Emily. 2025. Raised by birds (Or: Flying with the bone mothers: the curious story of the girl with a bird in her mouth). In: Jessie Carson; Jodie Hawkes and Pete Phillips, eds. Mothers, Mothering, Land and Nature. Bradford, Ontario: Demeter Press. [Book Section] (Forthcoming)

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Abstract or Description

In 1968, the skeleton of a young girl was excavated in a cave in Poland with the bones of a chaffinch in her mouth. Fifty years later, with the help of DNA sampling and historical research, archaeologist Malgorzata Kot traced the remains back to Finland. Not only were Finnish soldiers and their families deployed in that area in the late 17th Century, but Finnish folklore describes the concept of ‘soul birds’ being placed with the dead. The details surrounding the burial, however, remain elusive.

In the summer of 2023, Hilevaara travelled to Poland to meet Kot and learn more. She was able to see the girl’s bones (currently being held in two archival boxes at Warsaw University); and visit the site of her excavation, crawling on hands and knees inside the cliffs of the Ojkow National Park. She was able to see the barracks that most likely housed the girl’s family. In Krakow, she saw the skull of the finch that was found in the girl’s mouth, and another one that had been found a few centimetres away, on the dusty cave floor. The fragile cranial bones of the two adolescent finches replace the girl's own head, which is now missing, probably swept away by a flood that destroyed much of the archive in the Eighties.

Inspired by this strange archaeological find and the mysteries that continue to surround it, Hilevaara and Orley propose a series of speculative fabulations (as defined by Donna Haraway ) as they try to make sense of it. Through a collaborative writing exercise they will experiment with a method of call-and-response to explore ideas to do with motherhood, raising girls, grief and biopolitical symbiosis. They will enact a practice of possibility: what if the bones discovered, human and bird, told a different story? One which revealed a different way of inhabiting the earth? A way which involved a much closer coexistence that we assume now? When to be bird, to be human, to sing, to fly, and to expire were experiences that were shared? A past Symbiocene , that got lost?

Where did the birds come from? Who placed them there? What acts of care transpired? And whose acts were they? Those of a grieving parent, willing their daughter’s soul to be transported back to her homeland, or those of a charm of chaffinches? Who died first? What happens if we blur the role of the human and bird here, as we think about what it means to be a parent and lose a daughter? What happens when we think about caring for and letting go of our children afresh? What if the girl and the birds were not buried, but found somewhere to set their bodies aside as they learnt how to fly? What if parenting was about teaching your children to fly? About learning to fly? Did the girl ever have a human skull?

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