Beware the ides of March, the soothsayer warns Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's play of the same name. The bard's pithy turn of phrase has gone down in history. But few know that the sense of doom that the day evokes originated long before Caesar's ideas of establishing a dictatorship were brought to a gory end by his fellow senators. In Roman times, the ides of March - the word's Latin roots mean "divide" and the date sought to split the month - was most notable as a deadline for settling debts. A moneylender out for a pound of flesh, after all, can be as formidable as a bunch of men with knives, if not more so.

Ominous dates, signs or happenings are important tools of storytelling. They presage the climactic events that are to come, adding to the foreboding leading up to the finale. The gloomier and darker the atmosphere before a tragedy, the greater will be the impact on the audience. While a lot of omens can be explained by natural causes, nature, it is believed, was not going about business as usual in creating them. This strange, slippery realm of the preternatural allows people to weave their own desires, fears, and political judgments into the fabric of nature, and fulfils a human need to see the moral order reflected in the non-human domain.

In the natural world, birds, it seems, are especially misunderstood. Take, for instance, the raven. Apollo's messenger has been seen as a harbinger of bad news ever since he reported Coronis's unfaithfulness to his master - being scorched for eternity for his sins. Be it Shakespeare (remember Duncan's arrival at Macbeth's castle?) or his archrival, Christopher Marlowe (think of The Jew of Malta), literature has given corvids a bad name. Owls, too, are widely construed as portents of bad luck or, worse, death. The deaths of the likes of Caesar, Augustus, and Agrippa, it is said, were foretold by the hoot of an owl. In India, even though owls are associated with the goddess of wealth, they are demonized, and, at times, killed before Diwali to ward off evil. Such is the misfortune of owls that they rank even lower than corvids. In a Panchatantra tale, a horde of crows burns down a nest of owls.

At other times, it is horses that act as the carriers of death. The poisoned, rotting horse covered with flies in Wide Sargasso Sea or the two equines in Riders to the Sea are signs that the protagonists will be visited by death. In Macbeth, Duncan's horses, usually equanimous creatures, break out of their stalls and - believe it or not - eat each other before his murder.

But it is not living creatures alone, even something inanimate like tea leaves, too, can predict the dangers lurking in the future. In the original Harry Potter series, Professor Trelawney, reads a 'Grim' in Harry's tea leaves, predicting his death. Harry does die, albeit momentarily, at the end of the series. Trelawney's reading may or may not have been accurate, but ominous signs, whether living or non-living, do make for delightful reading.