Thoughts and Birds

In The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth gives a cameo appearance to a Count Sternberg, a cavalry officer

through whose brain thoughts would would shoot one at a time like lone birds through empty clouds, without brethren and leaving no trace

In  the Theatetus, Socrates uses the metaphor of knowledge and birds:

Now see whether it is possible in the same way for one who possesses knowledge not to have it, as, for instance, if a man should catch wild birds--pigeons or the like--and should arrange an aviary at home and keep them in it, we might in a way assert that he always has them because he possesses them, might we not?
And yet in another way that he has none of them, but that he has acquired power over them, since he has brought them under his control in his own enclosure, to take them and hold them whenever he likes, but catching which ever bird he pleases, and to let them go again; and he can do this as often as he sees fit...
... so now let us make in each soul an aviary stocked with all sorts of birds, some in flocks apart from the rest, others in small groups, and some solitary, flying hither and thither among them all.

Should Count Sternberg have hired a bird-catcher? The profession can hardly have died out with Papageno.