Bird daughters of Venus, and their possession of the Tree of the West is understandable.  And along with the Hesperides, of course, we find the serpent Ladon, who also helps protect the Golden Apples of the Western Tree.  Similarly, as found in the story of the Argonauts,¹⁷ a tree at the opposite end of the world, in the land of the Rising Sun, possessed its own golden object―in this case the fleece of a magical ram among whose powers was (bird-like) flight, and which, like the apples of the West, was protected by an ever-vigilant serpent.
    Leaving the eastern Mediterranean civilizations and moving north, we find that the Norse too have their World Tree, Yggdrasill.  And appropriately, this tree has its own Snake-Bird companions, for in the highest of its three branches (known as Peace-Giver) are nested an eagle and a falcon, the latter of whom maintained a vigilant watch over events on earth.  And gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasill, consonant with our theme, we find yet another serpent―the dreaded dragon Nidhug, whose ultimate goal was the destruction of Yggdrasill (and of the World).¹⁸
  In a similar vein, though this time moving southwest to Mesoamerica, the Mayan World Tree―the Wakan-Chan Tree, representing the Milky Way―has Itzam-Yeh or the Bird of the Big Dipper nested atop, and a double-headed serpent entwined about the trunk.¹⁹  Evidently, and not surprisingly, the World Tree as a symbol of the universe and its organic forces receives wide recognition by modern-day mythologists, although some of its parallel motifs go largely unnoticed.  Our common Christmas tree, for example, seems clearly to have evolved under the influence of the World Tree: the tree itself is the world, with the star (or, variously, winged angel) at the top representing the Star-Bird Venus, the golden (or, variously, popcorn) garland standing in for the Snake, and the numerous decorations signifying the myriad objects of the world.  What are not so widely recognized, however, are the Snake and Bird symbols themselves as tokens of creative forces.  Granted, Joseph Campbell does mention them as such in his Flight of the Wild Gander;²⁰ and Mircea Eliade even goes so far as to insist that the “creation of the world is the result of a conflict between two gods representing two polar principles: feminine (cosmologically lower, represented by the waters and the snake) and masculine (the upper region, the bird).”²¹  For the most part, however, the Snake-Bird motif, whose instantiations are world-wide and age-old, has not received the recognition it deserves.