I like the word describing this tendency:

apophenia : the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)

I learned the word on account of http://apophenia.info which is open source software used for the book "Modeling With Data" by Ben Klemens. His "21st Century C" is more commonly encountered.

I love how people will do anything to deny the lizard brain. We have a “spidey” sense just like all the other animals and for good reason. Ignore it at your peril should you ever have a brush with the side of nature that cares not for your “lack of studies”.

I’m a strong proponent for listening to your gut, but that’s very different from a bird landing on your home predicting death, especially when the correlation is weak (sometime later that year). It’s easy to attribute something to something else if there’s an indeterminate timeframe in between.

Remember that people see what they want to see in noise too. Clouds often look like something tangible, that doesn’t mean it’s a sign. If I squint, I can see shapes in pretty much any random pattern. And people tend to remember events that they attribute meaning too (in this case the old wives tale about the birds and then the family member dying) and forget the events that have no meaning to them (how many times did the person see said birds without anything happening and just forgetting about it?)

Nobody has yet managed to prove the existence of the supernatural, but many people have tried. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it seems pretty unlikely, especially when other better-understood causes exist.

It doesn't have to be supernatural. We know, for example, that dogs can smell various diseases. Also, someone pointed out that as people age and become ill, they tend to do less outside the house, and shy animals will start to come out and stay closer.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Blanket ridicule of such phenomena is just as irrational as are many superstitions.

Sure. But in this particular case, it sounds like there was a fairly longish period of time between seeing the "omen" and the supposed effect. Yes, the shy animals coming out was given as a reasonable explanation.

Over a period of time enough people noticed a correlation that it became an “old farmers/wives tale”. Had a university done a study with equal or lesser N you’d probably have taken it as fact. LOL

We're talking about birds portending human death. The author even suggested a likely explanation for how the old wives tale started (animals being attracted to run down places because the building's owner is being cared for elsewhere), which would seem to indicate they don't actually believe birds can tell when someone is going to die. I don't think this situation qualifies as "Spidey sense".

The existence of cognitive biases may help in some instances, and may harm in others. But they are not a substitute for data and proper experimentation or mechanism of actions.

It’s all data. Even the old farmers tales.