Birds: Myth, Lore and Legend

BIRDS AND US

Certain species – the tuneful thrush or raucous Rook – are garden companions, or glimpsed on trees and buildings, or heard in a moment of respite from manmade noise. Some, such as the swallow or elusive cuckoo, are harbingers of summer. The crane and stork among others are seasonal visitors from faraway places, famed for their long migrations. A few are now farmyard friends. All are the subject of colourful stories and beliefs, often influenced by their way of life, appearance or song.

DUCK

Anatidae

Donald Duck, Daffy Duck – ducks can be comical, as many people around the world agree. When a team of UK researchers scoured 70 countries earlier this millennium to discover what makes us laugh, ducks were pronounced the world’s funniest animal. ‘If you’re going to tell a joke involving an animal, make it a duck,’ said psychologist Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire who led the year-long LaughLab experiment.

Perhaps it is the way that many ducks move, particularly on land. The Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) and its domestic descendants have large, webbed paddle-like feet, set back on the body so that the bird waddles from side to side with every step. Female Mallards make the characteristic cartoon duck’s ‘quack’. Mallards, too, are typical ‘dabblers’, feeding on the surface of shallow water and performing further comic turns as they tip up their tails to scrounge for plants and insects in the mud below.

People have lived with ducks for thousands of years. Several wild duck species were common in ancient Egypt. Tomb images dating from the First Dynasty around 5,000 years ago show wildfowl, including the Northern Pintail (A. acuta), above, a winter visitor, being trapped in nets. Pictures of banquets reveal that roast and stewed wild duck were popular dishes.

POTENT WILDFOWL

Yet, the duck was more than food for the ancients. It figured in the language, too. A hieroglyph depicting the Northern Pintail was used both to represent the bird and also two consonants. The duck form featured as well in a host of ancient artefacts – many linked to human beauty – revealing that the bird was a fertility symbol and a representation of sexuality.

The link is often to feminine objects – elegant duck-shaped cosmetic spoons and vessels – but the potency of the male duck may also have been noted. Aristotle recognised that male wildfowl, unlike most other birds, have an external sex organ, as he mentions in relation to geese in his History of Animals. Indeed, one duck species, the South American Lake Duck (Oxyura vittata), below, has a place in Guinness World Records for its extraordinarily large penis, measuring 42.5cm (16¾in) everted and unwound – the biggest of any living bird.

Ducks were domesticated in ancient Egypt but possibly even earlier in the Far East. Pottery artefacts discovered in Fujian Province in southern China appear to suggest that the birds were raised for food at least 4,000 years ago. They were originally bred from Mallards but, in captivity with plentiful grain supplies, slowly increased in size, shed their colours and grew the white feathers that characterise some domestic ducks today. A domestic Pekin duck can weigh as much as 3.2kg (7lb) at just seven weeks of age. A wild adult Mallard would seldom weigh more than 1.4kg (3lb).

A SYMBOL OF FIDELITY

Useful as the domestic Mallard has proved in China, where it has long featured on the menu, it was never a revered species. That honour goes to the wild Mandarin (Aix galericulata), a colourful perching duck and a traditional symbol of marital bliss because it is believed that the birds mate for life (in fact they only stay faithful for the duration of the breeding season). In Tibet, India and Mongolia, the Ruddy Shelduck (Tadorna ferruginea) also symbolises fidelity and is considered sacred by Buddhists, whose priests wear robes similar in colour to its orange-brown plumage.

POSITIVE EMBLEMS

For the Native American Ojibwe people, the Goosander or Common Merganser (Mergus merganser), below – a large, long-bodied bird with white body and shiny green head (male) or grey body and rust-coloured head (female) – was a symbol of resilience and fortitude. In legend, the bird used these qualities to withstand the harsh winter of the northern states. For the southern Zuñi people, ducks were the form that spirits took when travelling home; the birds were also linked to fertility.

Elsewhere, duck mythology and lore are often linked to the bird’s aquatic skills. Success in an enterprise is taking to something ‘like a duck to water’. An insult or criticism is repelled ‘like water off a duck’s back’, reflecting the bird’s ability to waterproof its feathers. Ducks do this by preening their plumage with oil from a gland at the base of the tail and also with a dusty powder from special feathers called ‘pulviplumes’, which crumble at the tips to produce ‘powder down’.

NATIVE AMERICAN BELIEFS

The duck’s broad, flattened bill is adapted for filtering tiny plant and animal matter from the water, as Native Americans observed. In their creation mythology, the duck plunged to the depths of the primeval sea to bring up mud from which the earth was formed. In one legend of the Yokuts Indians, the duck also created California’s mountains. After a great flood in ancient times, when the land was covered with water, an eagle and crow were busy catching fish around a stump when one day, to their surprise, a duck swam along. The duck fished, too, but whenever he dived, he also brought up mud.

Putting their heads together, the eagle and crow wondered if the duck might be able to bring up enough mud to build an island. They each plied him with fish to persuade him to create mud piles on their respective sides of the stump. For many moons (and many fish), the duck plunged daily until at last the waters subsided. The huge piles of mud beside the eagle on one side and the crow on the other were transformed into great mountain ranges. The eagle’s range to the east was the mighty Sierra Nevada Mountains while the crow’s to the west was the California Coast Ranges.

A FORCE FOR GOOD

Throughout history, the image of ducks is almost universally benign – with one apparent exception. In the 13th century, when the Stedinger people of Friesland resisted the dominance of the German powers around them, Pope Gregory IX wrote letters denouncing the rebels as worshippers of the devil Asmodi, who appeared ‘sometimes in the shape of a goose or duck’. The Stedinger were massacred, yet the charge was clearly absurd. A duck demon never could ring true.

A colour etching of the Common Merganser by Lorenzo Lorenzi and Violante Vanni, from Natural History of Birds by Saverio Manetti (1723–1784), Florence 1767–1776.

BITTERN

Ardeidae

Easier to hear than to see, the bitterns are among the shyer, stockier and drabber birds of the heron family. Such traits are typical of the Great Bittern (Botaurus stellaris), above, a large, stout brown denizen of dense reedy marshland across Europe, renowned for its remarkable ‘song’ – usually described as a ‘boom’ – with which males announce their territory in spring. The deep, single note carries across several miles, and has the hollow, breathy quality of the noise made by blowing across the mouth of a large, half-filled bottle.

Perhaps because of this doleful sound or the bird’s appearance, in the Old Testament the Great Bittern is associated with desolation. Its call has also been likened to the huffing of an angry bull, possibly giving rise to the bird’s genus name, Botaurus. Its French nickname is similarly Boeuf d’eau (water ox or bull).

Many traditional English names for this bird refer to its voice – examples include ‘miredromble’, ‘bog bull’ and the colourful ‘thunder-pumper’. In the Middle Ages, the view was that bitterns made their far-carrying boom by inserting their bills into wet ground and then calling, allowing the sound to be carried through the water. Chaucer alludes to this in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’:

And as a bitore bombleth in the myre,

She leyde hir mouth unto the water doun.

Stalking along shallow waters in search of fish, frogs and other prey, the Great Bittern relies on its cryptic, streaky plumage for camouflage. When startled, it adopts a striking, upright posture with its bill pointing skywards. This has the effect of bringing the stripes on its plumage into alignment with the surrounding reeds, making the bird difficult to spot. It is also partly nocturnal, though most active at dawn and dusk.

SKY-GAZER

North America has its own native large bittern species, the American Bittern (B. lentiginosus). Similar to the Great Bittern, it shares its sky-pointing habit, giving rise to Native American names like sakuhkiriku (Pawnee), meaning ‘looks at the sun’. A curious legend associated with the bird’s nocturnal ways is the idea that it could radiate light from its breast, to illuminate the water by night. This is related, in slightly reserved tones, in a chapter on bird life in the 1829 publication The Young Lady’s Book: a manual of elegant recreations, exercises, and pursuits.

HERON

Ardeidae

There is something magical about the elegant, stately heron – the patient fisherman, alert and motionless on the waterside, waiting for prey to come within reach of its long, pointed bill. For some, herons are legendary for their fishing prowess; for others, the birds – especially the Eastern Great Egret (Ardea modesta) – are symbols of purity.

In ancient Egypt from the 16th century BC, the Bennu bird was widely depicted as a heron with a two-feathered crest. The Bennu was an Egyptian deity, linked to Atum, the primal Creator and Ra, the sun god. It was also the symbol of Osiris, a god who represented the underworld as well as resurrection and fertility. The deity may have been modelled on the Grey Heron (A. cinerea), above, a common year-round visitor to the lagoons and marshes of the Nile, or the tall Goliath Heron (A. goliath) – a striking bird with dark grey plumage and deep chestnut head, neck and crest, which stands 1.5m (5ft) high. It could also have been a rarer visitor to Egypt, the now extinct Bennu Heron (A. bennuides), identified from bird bones unearthed at the Umm al-Nar collective tombs on an island adjacent to Abu Dhabi in the 1990s.

CREATION BIRDS

In Egyptian creation mythology, the Bennu bird flew over Nun, the waters of chaos, alighted on a rock – the Benben mound – and uttered the first raucous cry to break the primeval silence as the world came into being. Its own spontaneous birth linked it to resurrection and the new life and fertility bestowed on the land by the annual flooding of the Nile. The Bennu was sometimes depicted under the rising sun on the branches of the small evergreen Persea, the Egyptian ‘tree of life’ at Heliopolis, city of the sun, and sometimes on the Benben mound or in a willow tree – the sacred tree of Osiris. Later, in the culture of the ancient Greeks, the Bennu was associated with the mythical Phoenix.

An illustration from around 1800 gives a good impression of the stature of the Goliath Heron – the world’s tallest heron.

Across the globe, in the Caribbean, the Taíno people also linked herons and other water birds to the birth of the world. In one pre-Columbian rock carving, a bird thought to be the Great Blue Heron (A. herodias) is shown in a primordial sky domain. Such fish-eating birds were associated with both sky and earth and, according to Taíno beliefs, were created by the supreme being, Yaya, directly after the creation of oceans and fish.

EXPERT ANGLERS

In Florida, the Native American Hitchiti tribe tell a story about hummingbirds and herons. Millennia ago the kings of both bird families were concerned that there might not be enough fish to feed them. So the hummingbird king proposed a race to the top of an old tree to decide who should own the fish. The hummingbird king lost because, try as he might, he could not suppress his desire to stop and sip nectar from the lovely flowers along the way; together with insects, nectar is a staple of the hummingbird diet. The heron king, however, flew straight and true, alighting first on the tree that was their goal, and winning for his family all the river and lake fish they could eat from that day on.

Herons can be extraordinarily clever anglers. In the US, Japan and Africa, the Striated Heron (Butorides striata) has been seen using bait to catch its prey. The birds will flick insects or colourful feathers, as well as human foods that they do not eat, such as popcorn or bread, into the water to attract fish. Native American tribes have long admired the birds’ skills. The Iroquois believed that just seeing a heron – especially the magnificent Great Blue Heron – presaged success in a hunt. The birds also symbolised wisdom and patience, reflecting their typical solitary vigil beside a river, lake or pond before they strike.

Similarly in Ireland, too, the Grey Heron represented contemplation and inner tranquillity, and it was bad luck to kill the bird. However, herons were eaten when times were lean, and some believed that dipping fishing bait into the stock in which the bird had been cooked would make the bait more potent and increase an angler’s catch.

PURSUED FOR FOOD AND FEATHERS

From medieval times until the 19th century, herons were hunted and eaten in Britain and were made royal game birds in the 16th century. They were also pitted in contests against hawks. The heron was known as ‘heronshaw’, and the saying ‘not to know a hawk from a handsaw’ stems from a contraction of this name. In Hamlet, Shakespeare’s tragic hero declares in Act 2: ‘I am mad but north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw’. In such falconry contests, wild herons would inevitably fly higher than their trained raptor pursuers as they tried to escape, earning themselves an unwarranted reputation for cowardice.

By contrast, in the Far East, the beauty of another heron – the Eastern Great Egret (A. modesta) – is honoured. Standing about 1m (3¼ft) tall, the pure white bird has a wingspan of up to 1.65m (5½ft). In one Siberian myth, Eastern Great Egrets are transformed into beautiful maidens. In Korea, the birds symbolise graciousness, transcending the mundane world. In Japan, the ritual Shirasagino-mai or White Heron Dance, dating back more than 1,000 years, is performed every year at the Senso-ji Temple. Resembling the birds’ own glorious courtship display, the dance was originally performed to banish the plague and purify spirits as they passed from this world.

PLUMAGE TO DIE FOR

The trade in feathers from two lovely, white herons, the Eastern Great Egret and the Western Great Egret (A. alba), cost the birds dear. In the 19th century, thousands upon thousands of egrets, as well as many other birds, were killed to satisfy the demand for fine plumes to adorn Western ladies’ hats. Such was the carnage – made all the worse because the feathers were at their finest in the breeding period – that the birds were hunted almost to extinction. Finally, a backlash against the slaughter gave birth to a new environmental movement and eventually legislation to prohibit the trade in plumes. The Western Great Egret became the symbol of the National Audubon Society, launched in the United States in 1905 and dedicated to the protection of birds.

STORK

Ciconiidae

In European folklore, the White Stork (Ciconia ciconia), above – a large, mainly white bird with red legs and black-fringed wings – has long played a central role in attempts to disguise the facts of life. The legend that storks are the bringers of babies is ancient, but the image of the birds plucking them from marshes, ponds and springs, where the souls of unborn infants reside, gained new prominence after the publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th-century story, The Storks. The bird’s size, meticulous parenting behaviour and habit of nesting on house roofs may have all contributed to its baby-bringing role. The idea has become so deeply rooted that tiny birthmarks on a baby’s nape or forehead are still known as ‘stork marks’.

In Germany and other parts of Europe, a stork flying over a house was deemed a sure sign of an imminent birth in the family. Historically, the prediction might well have proved valid as storks return from their migration to nest in Europe in the spring, some nine months after the summer solstice, a traditional festival celebrating fertility and a magical time for young lovers.

GOOD OMENS

Throughout mainland Europe, storks have long been considered good omens and often protected. The White Stork is the national bird of Lithuania and a bringer of good luck in Spanish and Ukrainian proverbs. In ancient Greece, it was said that any woman who befriended the bird would one day receive a jewel as a reward. The bird was also thought to protect against snakes; killing it was punishable by death.

In the Netherlands, Germany and Eastern European countries, storks were encouraged to nest on roofs to bring good fortune and harmony to the families living below. And such nests, too, reaching more than 2m (6½ft) in width and almost 3m (7ft) in depth as the birds return to chimney tops, towers, telephone poles, walls and steeples, as well as trees, and add to the structure each year. Perhaps because these homes are so visible, humans have long observed the birds’ parenting skills. Both male and female storks incubate the eggs and both feed the young birds until they are eight or nine weeks of age, after which fledglings will still continue to return to the nest for food. Storks are traditionally (but erroneously) thought to care for other birds, too; it was believed that they generously carried smaller species such as the Corncrake (Crex crex) on their backs during migration. Tales of this phenomenon were once widespread from Siberia to Egypt, Crete and North America.

For millennia people have watched the birds collecting in large numbers before taking flight on their long seasonal journeys. As an Old Testament verse from the Book of Jeremiah notes: ‘The stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times.’

While in reality the White Stork has no real call beyond the clacking of its bill, Scandinavian lore places the bird at the Crucifixion scene crying to Christ: ‘Styrket! Styrket!’, meaning ‘Strengthen ye!’.

BAD OMENS

Despite the saintlike qualities attributed to storks, the appearance and habits of many stork species – such as defecating on their scaly legs to cool themselves – are rather less attractive. The African Marabou Stork (Leptoptilos crumenifer), sometimes dubbed the ‘undertaker bird’ for its bald head, black, cloak-like back and wings, and habit of eating corpses, is one of the least lovely of the world’s birds. A hideous ‘monster bird’ that terrorised the South Texas Rio Grande Valley in the 1970s was thought by some ornithologists to have been a straying Jabiru (Jabiru mycteria), a tall, bald, red-necked stork native to Mexico, Central America and South America.

In northern Australia, the Aboriginal Hinbinga tribe forbad married men and women from eating the Black-necked Stork (Ephippiorhynchus asiaticus) – also called ‘jabiru’ – for fear that an unborn child would scratch the walls of the womb and cause its mother’s death. The White Stork was also among the birds declared ‘unclean’ in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. This was because their diet includes reptiles such as snakes, lizards and toads, as well as rodents – all considered ‘unclean’, making the bird that consumes them ‘unclean’ in its turn.

Other storks can be scavengers and carrion-eaters, too. In India, the large Greater Adjutant (Leptoptilos dubius) – though now endangered – is a notorious omnivore, joining vultures and kites at animal carcasses and rubbish dumps, and also consuming anything from live chickens to, in one recorded instance, a shoe.

HEALING POWERS

The Greater Adjutant Stork was considered ‘unclean’ and seldom hunted, though its flesh was sometimes used in folk medicine to cure leprosy. Perhaps because it killed snakes, this bird was also thought to provide an antidote to snake bites. It was believed that the stork’s low-hanging neck pouch might contain a snake fang, which, if rubbed above a snake bite, could prevent the venom spreading around the body. In India it was also thought that the head of a Greater Adjutant contained a celebrated ‘snake stone’, which when applied to snake bites would extract all the venom. Such stones were rare because, to obtain one, the bird had to be killed without its bill touching the ground; if this happened, the stone would dissolve.

SAVING THE STORK

Better sanitation, new pest-control methods and loss of habitat are thought responsible for the Greater Adjutant’s decline in Asia, and that of other species in Africa. In Europe and the US, too, pesticides and the drainage of wetlands have affected the birds’ breeding habits.

Yet, bolstered by storks’ highly positive image, conservation campaigns are bearing fruit. In Spain, White Stork populations have experienced a spectacular growth, thanks to new artificial nests replacing those destroyed during building work. The Swiss have nurtured a breeding programme for the same species over the past 40 years. In the US, the Wood Stork (Mycteria americana) is now ‘threatened’ rather than ‘endangered’. In the Lebanon, an increasingly vociferous campaign has been mounted against poachers who shoot down migrating birds. Paul Abi Rached, president of Lebanon Eco Movement, believes that stork migration could instead be central to ‘the most beautiful ecotourism’ in his country. ‘Nobody else can see them like this: it is the miracle of migration.’

A vintage colour illustration from the early 20th century reflects the popular and ancient myth that the stork brought newborn babies.

WISE AND UNWISE BIRDS OF FABLE

To make himself the most beautiful for Zeus, the Jackdaw adorns himself with borrowed feathers…

For as long as they have been observing the natural world people have been inventing fables – morality tales in which creatures are given voices and other human attributes – to instruct their compatriots how best to conduct their lives. Scholars such as the 19th-century orientalist Richard Burton even believed that fables directly reflect our instinctive