Month for Loki: Fifteen
by beanalreasa
Thinking about birds, shapeshifting…and Loki
Loki can shapeshift, but for some reason, He borrows Freyja’s falcon cloak on occasion.
For example, in Þrymskviða, Loki uses it to search for Mjolnir.
Loki also has kennings associating him with
Crows (meinkráka, harm crow)
Hawks (barni öglis, hawk’s child)
and
Vultures (gammleið, vulture’s path.))
bloodteethandflame 
He also uses the falcon cloak in Haustlöng to rescue Iðunn and dupe Þjazi (himself in hawk mode at multiple stages in the story) into swooping into the fire prepared by the Æsir and burning to death.
I wonder if there might be a gendered component to this, based on a Reddit comment I saw the other day (the most reliable historical source, naturally) mentioning offhand that shape shifting for men tends to show choices like wolves or bears, and birds for women. (I’ll go bother that person to see if they have sources on that; it sounds right, but something more concrete like actual textual analysis is better.) If I remember right, Ármann Jakobsson’s paper “Óðinn As Mother” also cites the story of Óðinn, *puking the mead of poetry* into the mouths of the Æsir like a mother bird, as an example of Óðin’s defiance of gender roles, though I don’t remember if he ties the bird thing to gender roles. Mind you it’s been 5+ years since I read the actual paper.