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Hans Peter Duerr - Dreamtime

The Tungus shaman runs out into the wilderness…. to the spirits of the ancestors, … he reaches the tree of his clan…. Ijakyl, the animal mother of shamans lies among its roots, she swallows the shaman’s soul and gives birth to it in animal shape.  From that day forward, the shaman possesses another side of his person, his animal part, which lives out in the taiga in a lonely tree.

What actually takes place is not that the shaman turns into an animal, but rather that he has now experienced his wild, his animal, aspect.  Not until that happens will he be a true shaman.  For he cannot know his human side until he also becomes aware of what he is not.  To put it differently, he needs to become estranged from it, to have seen it, that is to have seen it from the outside.  After experiencing that, he is no longer what he once was.  In pictorial representations, he now appears as a human bird or a human with bird’s legs