The Birds is card number 12 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows a pair of birds. In the tradition its core sense is talk, gossip, nervousness and short exchanges; being a pair, it can also mark two people or a brief conversation.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 7 of Diamonds, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the birds takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Die Voegel, literally the birds, conventionally depicted as a pair. As House 12 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on conversation, gossip or nervous energy. In combination, Birds followed by Letter reads as a phone call or spoken message rather than a written one, while Birds followed by Snake reads as gossip with a malicious edge. The card's pairing of two birds rather than one is itself read by some practitioners as marking any question involving two people talking or negotiating, distinct from the single-figure cards elsewhere in the deck.