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Thrushes and snails are scattered throughout the pages of A .S. Byatt’s Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, functioning as motifs that link the main narrative with its intertexts, thematically and symbolically. Although the thrush appears to be a predatory creature, it links a line of soothsayers and helpers created by Byatt herself as well as others in the works of Robert Browning, J.R.R. Tolkien and Thomas Hardy. The snail is a complex figure, associated with myths of life and death as well as with scientific research into neuroscience, environmental studies and DNA, the basis for all life. As a result it serves to bridge the two cultures of the literary and scientific worlds in the second half of Byatt’s tetralogy.