"[5] The image has frequently been perceived as whimsical, with a 1941 article in the Hartford Courant describing it as "characterized by the exquisite absurdity of Lewis Carroll's "Twas brillig and the slithy toves" and The Riverside Dictionary of Biography placing it in "a very personal world of free fancy".

MoMA suggests that, while evocative of an "abbreviated pastoral", the painting inspires "an uneasy sensation of looming menace" as the birds themselves "appear closer to deformations of nature".

[3] Kay Larson of New York magazine (1987), too, found menace in the image, which she describes as "a fierce parable of the artist's life among the philistines": "Like Charles Chaplin caught in the gears of Modern Times, they [the birds] whir helplessly, their heads flopping in exhaustion and pathos.

[4] This reflects the earlier view of Soby's Contemporary Painters (1948) that: The bird with an exclamation point in its mouth represents the twitter's full volume; the one with an arrow in its beak symbolizes an accompanying shrillness – a horizontal thrust of piercing song.

[15] In fact, as of 2018, Klee's painting has inspired more musical compositions than any other single piece of art, with more than 100 examples, from full symphony orchestra to solo piano.

[15][16] According to Time magazine, the two composers drew very different interpretations from the piece, with Schuller's work consisting of a "snatch of serial music in which the orchestra beeped, squeaked and rasped like a rusty hinge while the muted brasses burped out shreds of sound" while Diamond drew on "more somber tones: muted, dark-hued movements of the strings, with the picture's more jagged lines delineated by scampering woodwinds and brasses.

"[15] Kay Larson wrote in New York Magazine (1987) that the image was then "embedded in childhood prehistory", commenting that it "always seemed to be taped to kids' bedroom walls, next to Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy".