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There are pieces in this puzzle which do not fit together. Take for instance the list of birds:

The kena bird is located as number 8, not as number 1 which I have argued for. Manu tara 'points' (with her beak) at the beginning of a season, but not - as I guess - at the beginning of the year, but to the time when we can see sun return (from the northern sea), i.e. the beginning of spring.

'According to Wilkinson the barn swallow (Hurundo rustica) sitting foremost on the sunboat (travelling under the earth) is there to greet the morning sun's reappearance in the east.'

The barn swallow (as I have read in the morning paper after I wrote the cited sentence) does not stay in Egypt during the winter but is living in the southern part of Africa. Therefore we may interpret the picture as the yearly journey of the sun and the arrival to Egypt of the swallow as an 'omen' that sun now is back.

'Now birds and fishes are born under the sign of the Yin, but they belong to the Yang. This is why birds and fishes both lay eggs. Fishes swim in the waters, birds fly among the clouds. But in winter, the swallows and starlings go down into the sea and change into mussels.' (Ta Tai Li Chi according to Needham II)

Also: the undulations of the snake below the ship of the sun are 10 in number, as if to indicate 10 'pillars'.

The juvenile 'seasons' of the returned sun are - as I imagine - symbolized by the different stages in the development of the sea swallow (manu tara), and we may tentatively, therefore, pair together these stages with the juvenile sun seasons like this:

Although Metoro may have used a similar scheme while reading these glyphs, he at the same time may have thought about the explorers, making things even more complex. The explorers were 7 in number, not 4:

The astronomical year, as defined by the stars, may have had 10 'pillars'. The number of important bird species, though, is 16. If we pair together the birds species with sky pillars, there will be 6 kinds of birds without pillar support.

The sun year, as defined by the season of light, does not stretch over the whole astronomical year. Possibly the sun year begins at the beginning of the astronomical new year and ends after 9 * 28 = 252 days.

'... But the moon had 3 phases (in addition to its dark new moon phase), waxing, full and waning moon. Therefore a similar pattern should be found for the year, and 9 reasonably was to be divided into 5 + 4. The year should have 3 seasons, not equal in length (that was not possible with whole numbers) but with the pattern 5 + 4 + 4.'

To mark 9 periods we need 10 pillars. Aa1-11 could therefore be outside the solar year. Furthermore: 16 - 10 = 6, a number which associates with the sun, whereas 13 - 9 = 4, a number which associates with the moon.

I am now suggesting that the 15 first glyphs on side a of the Tahua text cover the whole 'bird year', that we should be able to pair birds and glyphs. There are 16 birds and 15 glyphs, but Aa1-15 may be paired with two birds.

Before we start the work of this pairing together, however, I must write down a little mystery:

There are two English words 'swallow', one of which means a kind of bird while the other means to "take into the stomach through the mouth and gullet" (English Etymology).

That is not so strange in itself, but reading further one finds "... ON. svelgr whirlpool, devourer, sylgr draught ..."

"draught ... act of drawing ... that which is drawn or pulled ... move at chess ... pl. game played on a board ... picture, sketch ... design, plan ... cesspool ... current of air ..."

I know that swallows swallow flying insects. But the act of swallowing has a mythical meaning. We may e.g. refer to the Hawaiian new year ceremonies:

'... Close kinsman of the king as his ceremonial double, Kahoali'i swallows the eye of the victim in ceremonies of human sacrifice (condensed symbolic trace of the cannibalistic 'stranger-king') ...'

Should the swallow be located at new year?

'... In the present context 'mouth' has an additional connotation, given that it refers in part to Heart of Earth, the deity called 'Mundo' today. This is the great Mesoamerican earth deity, the ultimate swallower of all living beings, depicted in Classic Mayan art (in the Palenque relief panels, for example) as an enormous pair of jaws upon whose lips even the feet of great lords must rest in precarious balance, and into whose throat even great lords must fall.  Turning to the contemporary scene, daykeepers who visit the main cave beneath the ruins of Rotten Cane, the last Quiché capital, speak of the danger of falling into 'the open mouth of the Mundo' there, which is said to be more than four yards wide ....' (Tedlock in his comments on Popol Vuh)

The old year has to pass through the 'door' marked 'exit' (deguchi) and in symbolic writing we therefore find a sign saying:  'mountain upon mountain' (i.e. an extremely old person) and 'mouth':

Is the kind little swallow an incarnation of the terrible Mundo?

"Gaster in his stories from the Jewish Targum, collected all over Europe, tells of a woman who when given a love-test by her royal lover, namely to come to him 'neither clothed nor unclothed, neither on foot nor on horseback, neither on water nor on dry land, neither with or without a gift' arrived dressed in a net, mounted on a goat, with one foot trailing in the ditch, and releasing a hare.

The same story with slight variations, was told by Saxo Grammaticus in his late twelfth-century History of Denmark. Askog, the last of the Volsungs, Brynhild's daughter by Sigurd, was living on a farm at Spangerejd in Norway, disguised as a sooty-faced kitchen-maid called Krake (raven). Even so, her beauty made such an impression on the followers of the hero Ragnar Lodbrog that he thought of marrying her, and as a test of her worthiness told her to come to him neither on foot nor riding, neither dressed nor naked, neither fasting nor feasting, neither attended nor alone. She arrived on goatback, one foot trailing on the ground, clothed only in her hair and a fishing-net, holding an onion to her lips, a hound by her side." (The White Goddess)

A beautiful maiden sooty like the manu tara - who is she? Krake was her name (too). And that name makes us remember the immense Kraken:

"Its [Hydra, the water-snake] representation has generally been as we have it, but the Hyginus of 1488 added a tree in whose branches the Hydra's head  is resting; probably a recollection of the dragon that guarded the apple-trees of the Hesperides, although this duty really belonged to our Draco; and at times it has been shown as three-headed. Map-makers have always figured it in its present form, the Cup [a turtle shell?] resting midway on its back, with the Raven pecking at one of its folds; Hydra preventing the latter's access to the Cup in punishment for its tattling about Coronis, or for its delay in Apollo's service."

"Hydra is supposed to be the snake shown on a uranographic stone from the Euphrates, of 1200 BC, 'identified with the source of the fountain of the great deep', and one of the several sky symbols of the great dragon Tiāmat." "Theon said that the Egyptians considered it the sky representative of the Nile, and gave it their name for that river."

"After Al Sufi's day, in our 10th century, the figure was much lengthened, and now stretches for nearly 95º in a winding course from Cancer to Scorpio [both hard shell animals]; this well agreeing with the fable of its immense marine prototype, the Scandinavian Kraken. Conrad Gesner, the 16th century naturalist, gave an illustration of this in its apparently successful attack upon the ship Argo.""For an unknown period its winding course symbolized that of the moon; hence the latter's nodes are called the Dragon's Head and Tail. When a comet was in them poison was thought to be scattered by it over the world; but these fanciful ideas are now associated with Draco."

"In China it [Alphard, α Hydrae] determined the 8th sieu, and was  the prominent star of the Red Bird that combined the seven lunar divisions of the southern quarter of the heavens."

Alphard is Ana-heu-heu-po, the pillar where debates were held, the 5th Tahitian sky pillar. Is there a terrible 'swallower' at the midstation of the astronomical year?

But Krake(n) means raven, and the raven (or crow, Saturn etc) we have (probably) met in Rb1-105:

Does that indicate that Aa1-10 is the place of execution, where suddenly many descendants will have room to grow after the big tree has fallen?