aŭguri

A job description, not a metaphor. The Roman augur was a public official. Before a magistrate took office, before an army marched, before a building went up, somebody stood in a marked-out patch of sky-watching ground and reported what the birds were doing: which direction they flew, in what numbers, what noise they made. That report was augurium, and the state acted on it. The English words that survive keep the shape of the institution rather than the belief: an inauguration is a ceremony that used to require the birds to approve, and something auspicious has had its avi-spex, its bird-watching, come out well.

Two accounts of where augur itself came from. The tidy one cuts it as avis plus garrire, bird plus chatter. The other traces it to augere, to increase, making the augur the man who declares a venture blessed and therefore likely to prosper. Roman writers argued about it and so do modern etymologists, so both are given here rather than one being smoothed into a fact.

How Esperanto uses it. Aŭguri covers the whole range: to divine formally, to predict, and, most commonly in ordinary prose, to bode. Tio ne aŭguras bonon is what you say when the signs look bad. The noun aŭguro is the omen or the prediction itself, and aŭguristo the person who makes a trade of it. It is a shade more ominous than antaŭdiri, to foretell plainly, which carries no sense of reading portents.

Careful with the diphthong. Aŭ is one syllable, so the word is aŭ-gu-ri, three beats, not four. That is the same aŭ you already say in aŭto and aŭdi, and the orthography article explains why the hat sits on the u rather than the a.