birdman

plural birdmen

1. A man who works with birds.
2. informalAn aviator.

   Alex sat her up and tried to revive her while George and his father looked for signs of life in the fallen birdman.

   1961, Tom Mead, Killers of Eden, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 72

3. A mythological creature that is part man and part bird.

   The ithyphallic bird-man is the climactic, ecstatic, instantaneous male principle confronting the enormous, slow, bovine, and enduring principle of the eternal feminine in her epiphany as the bison.

   1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 129