no rain the day a heron flies down the creek; that when woodpeckers
peck low on the tree-trunks expect a hard winter. These, and many
other nonsensical maxims, are in fact spurious. Most of them, no
doubt, were uttered originally in jest, or as a whimsical answer to
some inquisitive child, then repeated as amusing, and finally quoted
seriously. Others have been brought to us from the old world by early
farmer-immigrants—French in Canada, Louisiana and New England, Dutch
in New York, Swedish and German in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,
Spanish in the Southwest, and so on—and have been applied to our
native birds, where often they fail to fit. A saw that perhaps had
some value when told of the European robin or blackbird, is
ludicrously inappropriate when said of our blackbirds and robins,
which are totally different in nature and habits.

One of the most venerable of these worthless prognostics, and one that
very likely is a relic of Roman auspices, twenty-five centuries ago, is
that of the goose-bone:

  “To read the winter of any year take the breast-bone of a goose
  hatched during the preceding spring. The bone is translucent, and it
  will be found to be colored and spotted. The dark color and heavy
  spots indicate cold. If the spots are of light shade, and
  transparent, wet weather, rain or snow, may be looked for.

                 “If the November goose-bone be thick,
                 So will the winter weather be;
                 If the November goose-bone be thin,
                 So will the winter weather be.”

One need not wonder at the indignant refusal of hard-headed commanders
of old who refused to let their strategy or tactics to be interfered
with by alarmed priests who reported unfavorable auguries from dissected
hens. Eusebius records the legend that a bird was presented to Alexander
the Macedonian when on the point of setting out for the Red Sea, in
order that he might read the auguries according to custom. Alexander
killed the bird by an arrow, saying, “What folly is this? How could a
bird that could not foresee its death by this arrow, predict the
fortunes of our journey?” The shocked bystanders might have replied, of
course, that the poor creature had no such knowledge in itself, but was
merely the blank on which divine intelligence was written; but the
chances are that they held their tongues! Plutarch mentions many a case
in which commanders construed the “omens” in a way contrary to the
priestly interpretation, in order to carry out some plan that could not
be delayed, and yet conciliate the superstitious soldiers.

It will have been noticed that most of the prophecies learned from birds
relate to coming rain or bad weather, and winter rather than summer. In
_The Strange Metamorphosis of Man_ (1634), as quoted by Brewer,[34]
speaking of the goose, we read: “She is no witch or astrologer, ... but
she hath a shrewd guesse of rainie weather, being as good as an almanac
to some that beleeve in her.” Men generally seem more desirous of
ascertaining the evil than the good that may be in store for them. The
feeling is, perhaps, that if we knew of dangers ahead we might prepare
for them, but that in fair days we can take care of ourselves. Almost
every country has some particular “rain-bird” whose cry is supposed to
foretell showers. In England it is the green woodpecker, or yaffle; in
Malaya a broadbill; in some parts of this country the spotted sandpiper,
or tipup; but _everywhere_ some sort of cuckoo is called “rain-bird” or
“rain-crow,” although the various cuckoos of America, Europe, and the
Orient, differ widely in appearance, habits and voice.

Why should peoples so dissimilar and widely scattered attribute to this
very diverse cuckoo family the quality of “rain-birds” more than to
another family? I can only believe that it denotes the survival of a
very ancient Oriental notion, whose significance was very real in a
symbolic way to the primitive people among whom it originated locally,
but has now been utterly forgotten.

Plunging into the thickets of comparative mythology, hoping to pluck a
few fruity facts for our pains, we find that in Hindoo myths the cuckoo
stands as a symbol of the sun when hidden behind clouds, that is, for a
rainy condition of the sky; furthermore that this bird has a reputation
for possessing exceeding wisdom surpassing that of other birds, all of
which are fabled to be supernaturally wise: and that it knew not only
things present but things to come. It was, in fact, in the opinion of
the ancient Hindoos, a prophetic bird of unrivalled vatic ability. The
Greeks thought their own cuckoo had inherited some of these qualities,
for they made it one of the birds in the Olympian aviary of Zeus, who,
please remember, was the pluvial god.

Plainly this rainy-day character was given to the bird through the
circumstance that in southern Asia, as in southern Europe, the cuckoo is
one of the earliest and quite the most conspicuous of spring-birds—and
the spring is the rainy season. In early days farmers had little
knowledge of a calendar. They sowed and reaped when it seemed fitting to
do so. The coming of the cuckoo coincided with experience, and came to
be their almanac-date for certain operations—_a signal convenient in
advice to the young, or to a newcomer_; and as a rule hoped-for showers
followed the bird’s advent. In the same way old-fashioned Pennsylvania
farmers used to connect corn-planting time and the first-heard singing
of the brown thrasher.

Hesiod instructed his rural countrymen that if “it should happen to rain
three days in succession when the cuckoo sings among the oak-trees, then
late sowing will be as good as early sowing”—doubtless good agricultural
counsel. Not more than a century ago English farmers thought it
necessary to sow barley when the earliest note of the cuckoo was heard
in order to insure a full crop. Mr. Friend[11] reasons thus about this:
“As the cuckoo only returns to our shores at a certain time, it has been
customary to predict from his appearance what kind of season will
follow; and farmers have in all ages placed great reliance on omens of
weather and crops drawn from this source.... In Berwickshire those oats
which are sown after the first of April are called ‘gowk’s’ [cuckoo’s]
oats....

                     Cuckoo oats and wood cock hay
                     Make a farmer run away.

If the spring is so backward that the oats cannot be sown until the
cuckoo is heard, or the autumn so wet that the hay cannot be gathered in
until the woodcocks come over, the farmer is sure to suffer great loss.”

So much for these old maxims; and when British or Italian immigrants
became colonists in America, and found cuckoos here, they continued the
sayings, regardless of difference in climate and other circumstances.
Our species are not early migrants in spring, are poor guides for
planters, and seem to have no prophetic gift, yet they are rain-birds
because their ancestral relatives in India were such 3,000 years ago.

                              CHAPTER XII
               A PRIMITIVE VIEW OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

If anyone should ask you how a particular bird came to be blue or red or
streaked, or how it happened that birds in general differ in colors and
other features, “each after its kind,” in other words how specific
distinctions came about, you, a liberal-minded and well-read person,
would undoubtedly answer that each and all “developed” these specific
characteristics. You might go on to explain that they resulted from the
combined influences of natural and sexual selection, to the latter of
which birds are supposed to be especially susceptible, and thereby show
yourself a good Darwinist.

But primitive thinkers, like children, are not evolutionists but
creationists. They believe that things were made as they are: if so,
somebody made them. They are convinced that no person like themselves or
any of their acquaintances could do it, so they attribute the feat to
some being with superhuman powers. This being is almost always the
mythical ancestor, pristine instructor or “culture-hero,” of the nation,
tribe or clan to which the thinker belongs; and it is perfectly natural
and a matter of course to assume that he had magical functions and
supernatural powers. Next, some genius invents a story to fit the case,
and as anything is possible to such a being as the hero it is adopted
and passed into the tribal history that the elders recount by the
evening fire, and that everybody accepts without suspicion or criticism.
The Hebrews, for example, said that Adam, their “first man,” “gave names
to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the
field; ... and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the
name thereof.” As to his reasons for giving this name to one creature
and another to that, it has been whimsically explained that he called
the raccoon that because “it looked like a ‘coon’”—quite as good a
reason as the legend requires.

Now the two questions at the beginning of this chapter were, in fact,
asked by a great variety of our aboriginal Americans, the red Indians,
and undoubtedly by the aborigines of most other countries; but for the
present let us stick to North America.

When some bright-witted, inquisitive Iroquois youngster, hearing and
seeing many birds on a soft June morning, asked his mother how it
happened that they wore such a diversity of plumages, she told him this
story: In the beginning the birds were naked, but some of them became
ashamed, and cried for coverings. (In those days, of course, birds
talked with one another, and even with the wiser sort of men.) They were
told that their suits were ready but were a long way off. At last the
turkey-buzzard was persuaded to go and get them. He had been a clean
bird, but during the long journey had to eat much carrion and filth,
hence his present nature. Guided by the gods he reached the store of
plumages, and selfishly chose for himself the most beautifully colored
dress, but as he found he could not fly in it he was forced to take his
present one, which enables him to soar most gracefully. Finally he
brought their varied suits to the other birds.

The Iroquois lad would be quite satisfied with this account of the
matter; but a boy on the opposite side of the continent would get a very
different explanation. He would be told that Raven did it. Raven—or the
raven—was the mythical ancestor or culture hero, as ethnologists would
say, of the foremost clan of the Tlingit tribe, whose territory was in
southern Alaska. He was present at the making of the world and its
people, and did many marvellous things. While he was at Sitka arranging
affairs in the new world he assigned to all the birds, one by one, the
place of their resort and their habits, and his good nature is shown by
the fact that to the robin and the hummingbird he assigned the duty of
giving pleasure to men, the former by its song and the latter by its
beauty. By and by the birds dressed one another in different ways, so
that they might easily be recognized apart. They tied the hair of the
bluejay up high with a string, put a striped coat on the little
woodpecker, and so on. The Kwakiutl coastal Indians of British Columbia
deny this, however. They say the birds did not select their own
costumes, but that one of their ancestors painted all the birds he found
at a certain place. When he reached the cormorant his colors were
exhausted and he had only charcoal left, hence the cormorant is wholly
black.

George Keith,[99] who in 1807 was a fur-trader on the Mackenzie River,
gathered and recorded much valuable material as to the customs and ideas
of the Beaver Indians of that region, who belonged to the Ojibway
family. In one of his stories Keith gives the Indians’ explanation of
how certain birds got their colors: it was during the time of a great
flood. At that period all birds were white, but l’épervier (the
sharp-shinned hawk), l’émerillon (the goshawk), and l’canard de France
(mallard) agreed to change to a plumage in colors—how it was to be done
the Indians were unable to say. The story proceeds:

  Immediately after this event the corbeau [raven] made his
  appearance. “Come,” says l’épervier to the corbeau, “would you not
  wish to have a coat like mine?” “Hold your tongue!” rejoined the
  corbeau. “With your crooked bill is not white handsomer than any
  other color?” The others argued with the corbeau to consent, but he
  remained inflexible, which so exasperated l’épervier and the others
  that they determined to avenge this affront, and each taking a burnt
  coal in his bill they blacked him all over. The corbeau, enraged at
  this treatment, and determined not to be singular, espied a flock of
  étourneaux [blackbirds] and, without shaking off the black dust of
  his feathers, threw himself amongst them and bespattered them all
  over with black, which is the reason for their still retaining this
  color.

Further south, on Puget Sound, once lived the tribe of Twanas, who held
that in former times men painted themselves in various hues, whereupon
Dokblatt, their culture-hero, who notoriously was fond of changing
things, turned these men into birds, which explains the present
diversity in avian plumage.

The Arawaks of Venezuela, however, account for this matter by saying
that the birds obtained their gay feathers by selecting parts of a huge,
gaudily colored water-snake that the cormorant killed for them by diving
into the water; yet the cormorant, with great modesty, kept for himself
only the snake’s head, which was blackish.

Most explanatory stories concern single kinds of birds, and inform us
how they got the peculiar features by which we identify them with their
names; and here we get back to the nearctic raven. A history of the
exploits of this personage—bird, bird-man or bird-god—who is the hero of
more tales than any other of the giants that flourished in the formative
period of the northern Indian’s world, would fill a big book. “The
creator of all things and the benefactor of man was the great raven
called by the Thlingit Yel, Yeshil or Yeatl, and by the Haida
Ne-kilstlas. He was not exactly an ordinary bird but had ... many human
attributes, and the power of transforming himself into anything in the
world. His coat of feathers could be put on or taken off at will like a
garment, and he could assume any character whatever. He existed before
his birth, never grows old, and will never die.” So Mr. (now Admiral)
Niblack, U. S. N., characterized this supreme magician;[100] and Dr. E.
W. Nelson[101] adds that this creation-legend is believed by the Eskimos
from the Kuskoquim River in southern Alaska northward to Bering Strait,
and thence eastward all along the Arctic Coast. The purely mythological
relation of this widely revered northwestern raven is thus summarized by
Brinton[27]:

  This father of the race is represented as a mighty bird, called Yel,
  or Yale, or Orelbale, from the root [Athabascan] _ell_, a term they
  apply to everything supernatural. He took to wife a daughter of the
  Sun (the Woman of Light), and by her begat the race of men. He
  formed the dry land for a place for them to live upon, and stocked
  the rivers with salmon that they might have food. When he enters his
  nest it is day, but when he leaves it it is night; or, according to
  another myth, he has two women for wives, the one of whom makes the
  day, the other the night. In the beginning Yel was white in plumage,
  but he had an enemy ... by whose machinations he was turned black.
  Yel is further represented as the god of the winds and storms, and
  of the thunder and lightning.

It is plain that in studying the deeds and accidents attributed to this
American member of the sun-born “fabulous flock” described in another
chapter, it is often difficult to separate Raven the demigod, from the
sable, kawing, cunning bird so conspicuous all over northern Canada; and
in this respect Yel differs from Rukh, Simurgh, and the other similar
figments of Oriental fancies, in that he is modelled upon a real bird,
rather than on something utterly unknown to earthly ornithology.

A favorite tale with many variants describes how the cormorant lost its
voice. As the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Islands tell it, Raven once
invited the cormorant to go a-fishing with him. The cormorant went, and
naturally caught many fish, while the Raven took none. Then Raven, angry
made the cormorant stick out its tongue. “There is something on it,”
quoth Raven, and pulled the tongue out by the roots; and that is why
cormorants have no voice.[C]

Footnote C:

  The cormorant was once a wool-merchant. He entered into a partnership
  with the bramble and the bat, and they freighted a large ship with
  wool. She was wrecked and the firm became bankrupt. Since that
  disaster the bat skulks about until midnight to avoid his creditors,
  the cormorant is forever diving into the deep to discover its
  foundered vessel, while the bramble seizes hold of every passing sheep
  to make up the firm’s loss by stealing the wool. This is an ancient
  European story quite as silly as the Haida one.

Here Raven is plainly the supernatural, irresponsible being of Totemic
importance, who often presented himself as a man or in some other form,
for he could assume any shape he liked. Thus the Hudson Bay Eskimos
relate that Raven was a man who loudly cautioned persons when moving a
village-camp not to forget the deer-skin under-blanket called “kak”: so
he got that nickname, and ravens still fly about fussily calling _kak!
kak!_ The Tlingits also have a story in which Raven begins the action as
a man, and ends plain bird—an outwitted one at that. Raven was in a
house and played a trick on Petrel, then tried to get away by flying up
through the smoke-hole in the roof, but got stuck there. Seeing this
Petrel built a birchwood fire under him, so as to make much smoke. The
raven was white before that time, but the smudge blackened him forever.

The Greenland Eskimos account for the change in the raven from white to
black by the story of its vexing the snow-owl, which was its fast friend
in the ancient days before marvels became marvellous. One day the raven
made a new dress, dappled black and white (the summer plumage), for the
owl, which in return fashioned a pair of whalebone boots for the raven,
and also a white dress, as was proper for ravens at that time; but the
raven would not stay quiet while it was tried on. The owl shouted
angrily, “Sit still or I shall pour the lamp over you!” Nevertheless the
bird kept hopping about until the owl, out of patience, picked up the
soapstone saucer-lamp and drenched him with the sooty lamp-oil. Since
then the ever-restless raven has been black all over.

The Haidas say that the crow likewise was originally white, and that on
one occasion Raven turned it black as a spiteful sort of joke.

It is interesting to recall that in classic myth ravens were once as
white as swans and as large; but one day a raven told his patron,
Apollo, that Coronis, a Thessalian nymph whom he passionately loved, was
faithless, whereupon the god shot the nymph with his dart, but hating
the telltale bird

             ... he blacked the raven o’er
             And bid him prate in his white plumes no more,

as Ovid sings in Addison’s translation. Some accounts say that one of
Odin’s messenger-ravens was white. To this day the peasants about
Brescia, in Italy, speak of January 30 and 31, and February 1, as
“blackbird days,” and explained that many years ago the local blackbirds
were white; but in one hard winter it was so cold these thrushes were
compelled to take refuge in chimneys, and ever since have worn a sooty
plumage.

This belief that the sable brotherhood of the crow-tribe was once white
seems to be universal, and perhaps arises in the equally general, albeit
somewhat childish, feeling that nothing is as it used to be; and coupled
with this is the similarly common feeling that every event or condition
ought to be accounted for. Thus we get a glimpse at the psychology in
these primitive stories of the reason why this and that animal is as we
see it. Skeat[7] found among the Malays, for example, a legend that in
the days of King Solomon the argus pheasant was dowdily dressed, and it
besought the crow to paint its plumage in splendid colors. The crow
complied and gave the pheasant its present beautifully variegated
costume; but when the artist asked for a similar service toward itself
from the pheasant the latter not only refused but spilt a bottle of ink
over the crow.

To return to the erratic, and usually mischievous career of Yel, the
Northwestern (raven) culture-hero, it is remembered that often, kindly
or unkindly, he changed sundry birds besides owls from something else
into their present form. For example, he sent a hawk into the Tlingit
country after fire. Previously the hawk’s bill had been long, but in
bringing the fire this long beak was burned short, and has ever remained
so. Nelson[101] learned from Alaskan Eskimos why the short-eared owl has
so diminutive a beak, nearly hidden in the feathers of the flat face.
This owl, it appears, was once a little girl who lived in a village by
the lower Yukon. “She was changed by magic into a bird with a long bill,
and became so frightened that she sprang up and flew off in an erratic
way until she struck the side of a house, flattening her beak and face
so that she became just as the owls are seen to-day.”

Raven made woodpeckers (red-shafted flickers) out of the blood that
gushed from his nose after he had bruised it; and Haida fishermen now
tie scarlet flicker feathers to their halibut hooks “for luck.” Their
neighbors, the Clalams, thought it better to use a piece of kingfisher
skin—and in my opinion their reasoning was the sounder of the two.
Perhaps it was Raven whom the Tshimshian Indians of Nass River meant
when they spoke of “Giant’s” treatment of the gulls. The Giant, as
Professor Boaz heard it designated, had some oolachans (smelts) and
stuck them on sticks to roast by his fire. “When they were done a gull
appeared over the Giant. Then the Giant called him ‘Little Gull.’ Then
many gulls came, which ate all the Giant’s oolachans. They said while
they were eating it _qana, qana, qana!_ Then he was sad. Therefore he
took the gulls and threw them into the fireplace, and ever since the
tips of their wings have been black.”

The culture-hero of the Twana Indians of the Puget Sound region was
Dokibat, as has been mentioned, who had a habit of changing things,
turning men into stones or birds, and so forth. A boy hearing that he
was coming, and fearing some unpleasant transformation, ran away,
carrying with him a water-box (used in canoe-journeys by sea) with water
in it. The water shaking about sounded somewhat like _pu-pu-pu_ when
repeated rapidly; but as the boy ran wings came to him and he began to
fly, and the noise in the box sounded like the cooing of the wood-dove,
which the Twans called “hum-o.” A man was pounding against a cedar-tree.
Dokibat came along and asked him what he was doing. “Trying to break or
split this tree,” was the answer. Dokibat said: “You may stop and go
away, and I will help you.” As the woodman went wings came to him, also
a long bill and a strong head, and he became a woodpecker.

How the woodpecker got the red mark on the back of its head, which is a
characteristic of most species, is explained by the Algonkins thus,
according to Schoolcraft:[102] Manabozho, the renowned culture-hero of
the Ojibways and their relatives, made a campaign against the Shining
Manito, and at last, finding him in his lair, a mortal combat began. At
length Manabozho had left only three arrows, and the fight was going
against him. Ma-ma, the woodpecker, cried out: “Shoot him at the base of
the scalp-lock; it is his only vulnerable spot!” (The Indians have many
stories turning on this point, and reminding us of that of Achilles.)
Then with the third and last arrow Manabozho hit the fatal spot, and
taking the scalp of the Shining Manito as a trophy he rubbed blood from
it on the woodpecker’s head, which remains red in his descendants. That
the redheaded species (_Melanerpes torquatus_), abundant in summer in
the Ojibway country, is meant here is evident from the further statement
that its red feathers were thereafter regarded as symbols of valor, and
were chosen to ornament the warriors’ pipes, for no other woodpecker of
the region could furnish enough such feathers to answer the purpose.

The Menominees, of southern Wisconsin, had a different story relating to
the scarlet crest of another kind of woodpecker. They say that
Ball-carrier, who was a bad-tempered sort of fellow among their
demigods, promised the logcock, or big black woodpecker of the forest,
that if he would kill a certain Cannibal-Woman he should have a piece of
her scalp with its lock of red hair. So the bird rushed at her and drove
his chisel-like beak into her heart. Then Ball-carrier gave her red
scalp-lock to the logcock, which placed it on his own head, as one may
see now. In Indo-European mythology woodpeckers figure among
lightning-birds, and the red mark on their heads is deemed the badge of
their office.

The need of accounting for notable features like this in animals seems
to have appealed to all sorts of people, all around the world, in each
case according to local ideas. Thus an Arabic tradition current in
Palestine accounts for the fork in the tail of swallows by the fact that
a bird of this species baffled a scheme of the Old Serpent (Eblis) in
Paradise, whereupon the serpent struck at it, but succeeded only in
biting out a notch in the middle of its tail. Another example: Nigerian
negros say that the vulture got its bald head by malicious transference
of a disease with which a green pigeon had been suffering—a native guess
at the filth-bacteria to which modern zoologists attribute the
nakedness! Oddly enough, a folk-tale in Louisiana, related by
Fortier,[106] similarly explains the baldness of our turkey-buzzard by
saying it came from a pan of hot ashes thrown at the vulture’s head in
revenge for an injury it had committed on a rabbit—and “buzzards never
eat bones of rabbits.”

The Iowas account for the peculiar baldness of this bird by a long story
recounted by Spence[12] in which their mythical hero Ictinike figures.
Ictinike asked a buzzard to carry him toward a certain place. The crafty
bird consented, but presently dropped him in a tall hollow tree.
Ictinike was wearing ’coonskins, and when presently some persons came
along he thrust their tails through cracks in the trunk. Three women,
thinking that raccoons had become imprisoned in the tree, cut a hole to
capture them, whereupon Ictinike came out and the women ran away. Then
Ictinike lay down wrapped in his furs as if asleep, and an eagle, a
crow, and a magpie came and began pecking at him. The buzzard, thinking
this meant a feast, rushed down from the sky, and Ictinike jumped up and
tore off its scalp, since which the buzzard has been bald.

But many explanations of why birds are now so or so make no mention of
Ravens or Ictinikes, but just tell you the fact. Thus the Eskimos of
northwestern Alaska relate that one autumn day very long ago the cranes
prepared to go southward. As they were gathered in a great flock they
saw a beautiful girl standing alone near a village. Admiring her
greatly, the cranes gathered about her, and lifting her on their
wide-spread wings bore her far up and away. While the cranes were taking
her aloft their brethren circled about below her so closely that she
could not fall, and with hoarse cries drowned her screams for help. So
she was swept away into the sky, and never seen again. Always since that
time the cranes have circled about in autumn, uttering loud cries.

The Hudson Bay Eskimos tell their boys and girls when they see the funny
little guillemots by the sea-cliffs and ask about them, that once a lot
of children were playing near the brink of such a precipice. Their noisy
shouts disturbed a band of seal-hunters on the strand below; and one of
the men exclaimed, “I wish the cliff would topple over and bury those
noisy children!” In a moment the height did so, and the poor infants
fell among the rocks below. There they were changed into guillemots and
dwell to this day on the crags at the edge of the sea.

Another juvenile story explains that the swallows became what they are
by a change from Eskimo children who were making “play-house” igloos of
mud on the top of a cliff. To this day the swallows come every summer
and fix their mud nests to the rocks, recalling their childish joy in
the previous state of their existence. Hence the Eskimo children
particularly love to watch these birds in their “igluiaks,” which are
said not to be molested by the predatory ravens.

Once a long war was fought between the brants and the herons, according
to a Tlingit legend, but at last the swans intervened and a peace was
arranged. To celebrate it the herons indulged in much dancing, and have
been dancers ever since. I am inclined to think this another crane
legend, because the few herons known in the Tlingit country do not
indulge in such antics, whereas the cranes do “dance” a great deal in
the mating-season. These Indians, by the way, say that they learned the
use of pickaxes by watching a heron strike the ground with its beak; and
the suggestion of snowshoes was caught from the ptarmigan, on whose feet
grow in winter expansions of the toes that serve to make it easier for
the bird to walk on snow.

The ruffed grouse, the Ojibways declare, was marked with eleven spots on
its tail to remind him of the time when he wouldn’t do as he was told,
and had to fast eleven days as a punishment. On the other hand Manabozho
rewarded the kingfisher for some useful information by hanging a medal
(in color) about its neck; but in bestowing the medal Manabozho snatched
at the kingfisher’s head, intending to twist it off—a very
characteristic dodge of these treacherous old culture-heroes—but only
rumpled the bird’s crest, so that it has been a ragged sort of headdress
ever since.

The extinct Chitimacha Indians of northern Louisiana had a tale that a
man set the marshes on fire, and a little bird uprose through the smoke
and remonstrated. The man was angry and threw a shell at the bird, which
wounded its wings and made them bleed, and thus the red-winged blackbird
got its scarlet shoulders.

A familiar and active little shrike of the northern border of South
America is the kiskadee, with a conspicuous white mark on its head. The
Arawaks say that this radiant little songster, which has the same sort
of fierce hostility to hawks and other large birds as distinguishes our
doughty kingbird, got tired of a war that was going on among the
animals, put a white bandage around its head and pretended to be sick.
The war halted long enough to expose the fraud of the little malingerer,
and kiskadees were sentenced to wear the white bandage perpetually.

Arawak story-tellers also relate that the trumpeter (Psophia) and a
kingfisher quarrelled over the spoils of war, and knocked each other
into the ashes, which accounts for the gray of their plumage. The
nakedness of the trumpeter’s legs is owing to his stepping into an ant’s
nest, and getting them picked clean. The owl discovered a package among
the spoil of the war that contained only darkness, since which that bird
cannot endure daylight. It is interesting to compare with this the
adventure of the trumpeter current among the Maquiritares, which is
related elsewhere.

So the stories go on. The Pimas, for example, believe that the mountain
bluebird was originally an unlovely gray, but acquired its present
exquisite azure coat by bathing in a certain lake of blue water that had
neither inlet nor outlet. It bathed in this regularly for four mornings.
On the fourth morning it shed all its plumage and came out with the skin
bare; but on the fifth morning it emerged from its bath with a coat of
blue.

This tradition is somewhat sentimental, as befits the sweetly warbling
and beloved bluebird, which is not only a favorite, but has a certain
sacredness in the southwest; but often, in the majority of cases
perhaps, a rough humor tinges the history. Thus Manabush, a mythical
ancestor of the Menominees, once assembled all the birds by a
subterfuge, and then killed several. The little grebe, or “hell-diver,”
was one of those chosen for death, and as it was a poor runner it was
easily caught. Manabush said contemptuously, “I won’t kill you, but you
shall always have red eyes and be the laughing-stock of all the birds.”
With that he gave the poor bird a kick, sending it far out into Lake
Michigan and knocking off its tail, so that the hell-diver is red-eyed
and almost tailless to this day.

I have restricted this chapter mainly to examples from the folklore of
the American Indians, but, were there not danger of becoming tedious,
many more might be quoted from the fireside tales of other countries,
especially Africa. African traditions, however, can hardly be held to
account for the following explanations by some Southern darkies as given
by Martha Young[2]:

  The bluejay was yoked into a plow by the sparrow, and the
  necklace-like mark on his breast is the mark left by the yoke worn
  in this degrading service.

  The buzzard originally had a “fine plume sweepin’ from de top of his
  head,” but lost it in a quarrel with a dog. “Sense dat day Buzzard
  don’t never miss fust pickin’ out de eye of ev’thing that he gwine
  eat,” so that it cannot see to resist if it is not quite dead.

  Darkies say that the hummingbird lost her voice—“she choke her voice
  clean out of her wid honey”—through being so greedy when she first
  discovered the honey in flowers, by reason of contracting a
  “swimmin’ in de head” by incessant whirling, as her poising on wings
  seems to the negroes. “She hav a notion now that she los’ her voice
  ... deep in some flower. She’s al’a’rs lookin’ fer dat los’ voice.
  Flash in dis flower! Dash in dat flower! But she’ll nuvver, nuvver
  fin’ it.”

Charles G. Leland quotes in his _Etruscan Roman Remains_[97] a note
given him by Miss Mary Owen, of St. Joseph, Missouri, that the negroes
and half-breeds in southern Missouri consider the redheaded woodpecker a
great sorcerer, who can appear as either a bird or as a redman with a
mantle or cloak on his arm. He is supposed to be very grateful or very
vengeful as his mood requires. He sometimes bores holes in the heads of
his enemies, while they sleep, and puts in maggots which keep the
victims forever restless and crazy. He made the bat by putting a rat and
a bird together.

                              CHAPTER XIII
                        BIRDS AND THE LIGHTNING

Nothing in nature, except perhaps the rising and setting of the sun, has
impressed mankind more than the fearsome phenomena of a thunder-storm.
Such a storm in the Rocky Mountains, or among the Californian Sierras,
is truly terrifying in its magnificence, and it is none the less so in
the Alps or Himalayas or on the volcanic summits of Central Africa. The
lightnings dart about the darkly clouded peaks, and the thunder-crashes
leap from cliff to cliff in echoes that stun one, for they seem like
vast iron missiles hurled by Titanic strength, and rebounding from crags
that are falling in prodigious ruin—perhaps on your head.

On the plains, too, such a storm may be fearfully grand, for amid
rolling thunders and a tremendous downpour of rain come an incessant
flash and sparkle of lightnings that illuminate the prairie with a
violet flame almost blinding in its glare. A person who did not
comprehend the physical meaning of such a display might well be excused
for trembling in awe and terror—moreover, the danger is real.

I believe that almost from the first there were wise men, the
philosophers of their time, who understood that the clouds were fleeting
masses of fog, that rain was the water pressed out of them, and that the
lightning and its associated rumble were somehow as natural as the
blowing of the wind. The mass of wondering and terrified people,
however, could not think of the rush and noise and glare of stormy
weather otherwise than as something produced by living beings of huge,
mysterious and usually destructive power; and they were as real to them,
although invisible, as are the electric currents and tremendous
air-vibrations to us. Among the aboriginal Chinese electricity was
represented as residing on the mountains in the form of birds, and their
Thunder-god is pictured with a bird’s beak and claws, and armed with a
drum and hammer.

“The drama of mythology,” De Gubernatis tells us, “has its origin in the
sky; but the sky may be either clear or gloomy; it may be illumined by
the sun or by the moon; it may be obscured by the darkness of night, or
the condensation of its vapors into clouds.... The god who causes rain
to fall, who from the highest heaven fertilizes the earth, takes the
form now of a ram, now of a bull; the lightning that flies like a winged
arrow, is represented now as a bird, now as winged horse; and thus, one
after another, all the shifting phenomena of the heavens take the form
of animals, becoming at length now the hero himself, now the animal that
waits upon the hero, and without which he would possess no supernatural
power whatever.”

To the minds of the redmen in the eastern part of the United States the
violent storms frequent in summer were somehow produced by vague
supernatural beings spoken of as Thunder-gods; but on the open prairies
and plains of the West, where even more terrific electric disturbances
occur, and also along the Northwest Coast and in Alaska, they were
attributed to birds of enormous size, who darkened the rain-clouds with
their shadows and produced thunder by flapping their wings and lightning
by opening their eyes, shooting flaming arrows, and so forth. Some
tribes believed in one such bird only, others in a family or flock of
them variously colored, while still others declared that the agent was a
giant who clothed himself in a huge bird-skin as a flying-dress.

If one asked what any one of these creatures was like, the answer
usually was that it resembled a colossal eagle. The Comanches and
Arapahoes described it to Dr. Mooney as a big bird with a brood of small
ones, and said that it carried in its claws a quantity of arrows with
which it strikes the victims of lightning. This reminds us of the bird
of Jove in classic fable, clutching the javelins of his master, the
Thunderer; and a comic touch is that these southern Indians called the
eagle stamped on our coins by their thunder-bird’s name, innocently
supposing that our national emblem was their “baa,” the lightning-maker!

The Mandans, a Dakotan tribe, say that the thunder-bird has two toes on
each foot—one before and one behind; and the Algonquian Blackfeet
represent it on their medicine-lodges by simply drawing four black
bird-claws on a yellow shank. When it flies softly, as is usually its
way, according to the Mandans, it is not heard by mankind, but when it
flaps its wings violently a roaring noise is produced. It breaks through
the clouds to force a way for the rain, and the glance of its fiery eyes
appears in the lightnings. “We don’t see the thunder-birds,” a Winnebago
Indian explained. “We see their flashes only.”

This terrifying creature dwelt on a remote mountain, or on some rocky
elevation difficult of access, and built a nest as big as a village,
surrounded by the bones and horns of the great animals on which it
preyed. Every tribal district seems to have had at least one pair. The
Indians about Lake Superior believed that theirs were at home on the
beetling heights of that bold promontory on the northern shore of the
lake long celebrated as Thunder Cape. This is, for natural reasons, a
theatre of electric action, which the Chippeways accounted for by the
fiction of a magic bird—quite as natural in its way as is the
meteorology. At any rate the redmen feared to climb the mountain and
prove their theory, for they said men had been struck by lightning there
in impious attempts at investigating the bird-god—the old story of
religious interference with scientific curiosity. These same people held
that their thunder-bird sat on her eggs during fair weather, and hatched
out her brood in the storm—which hatching _was_ the storm.

“A place,” says the ethnologist Mooney,[77] “known to the Sioux as
Waqkina-oye, ‘the Thunderer’s nest’—... is in eastern South Dakota in
the neighborhood of Big Stone Lake. At another place, near the summit of
the Coteau des Prairies, in eastern South Dakota, a number of large
round boulders are pointed out as the eggs of the thunder-bird.
According to the Comanches there is a place on upper Red River where the
thunder-bird once alighted on the ground.... The same people tell how a
hunter once shot and wounded a large bird which fell to the ground.
Being afraid to attack it alone on account of its size, he returned to
camp for help, but on again approaching the spot the hunters heard the
thunder rolling and saw flashes of lightning shooting out from the
ravine where the bird lay wounded. On coming nearer the lightning
blinded them so that they could not see the bird, and one flash struck
and killed a hunter. His frightened companions then fled back to camp,
for they knew it was a thunder-bird.”

In contrast to this the Eskimos of the lower Yukon Valley tell of a
former man of their race who dared, after others had failed, to raid the
lair of and kill a gigantic fowl that for a long time had preyed as a
“man-eater” on the village of their ancestors; and they have held this
man in high honor as a hero to this day.

This conception of a thunder-and-lightning-producing bird has a
prominent place among the notions of the native inhabitants of the
northwestern American coast-country, where the attributed
characteristics and deeds vary with local surroundings and tribal
peculiarities. In one place a storm was supposed to result from its
activity in catching whales; and a Chehalis legend has it that
Thunderbird sprang from a whale killed by South Wind. As soon as it was
born South Wind followed it, and Ootz-Hooi, the giantess, found its nest
and threw the eggs down a cliff. From these eggs sprang the Chehalis
people. The Tlingit, of the Southern Alaskan coast-region, account for
the great amount of rain that falls in a thunder-shower by explaining
that the thunder-bird carries a lake on its back. A conventional
representation of the thunder-bird as it appears to the Haidas of this
Northwest Coast decorates the title-page of this book.

The Salish Indians of the Thomson River region, in southern British
Columbia, believe that the thunder-bird uses its wings as bows to shoot
arrows, _i.e._, lightnings. “The rebound of his wings in the air, after
shooting, makes the thunder. For this reason the thunder is often heard
in different parts of the sky at once, being the noise from each wing.
The arrowheads fired by the thunder are found in many parts of the
country. They are of black stone and of very large size.” The last
statement may refer to meteoric stones, or it may be purely fanciful. A
common belief among the farmer-folk of Europe is that the smooth,
chisel-shaped tools or weapons of prehistoric (Neolithic) men,
frequently turned up by the plow, and known technically as “celts,” are
thunderbolts; but this is only incidental to the present theme.

The raven is a hero-bird among the Cherokees, who say that he became
black by attempting to bring fire from a hollow tree that had been set
on fire purposely by “the Thunderer” by means of lightning. The bird did
not succeed, and blackened its plumage forever.

In Japan the ptarmigan, a dweller on mountain-tops, is called _rai-cho_,
“thunder-bird,” and is “sacred to the God of Thunder,” as Weston
expresses it, adding that “pictures of them are often hung up in
farmers’ cottages as a charm against lightning.”

Thunderstorms are usually accompanied by much wind, and the common
conception of birds as the agent of wind, or the wind itself, has been
exhibited briefly in another chapter; it prevailed not only among our
American Indians but in various other parts of the world, including
South Africa—or did, when men were less skeptical of such ideas than
now. In ancient Sanskrit mythology the delicate white cirrus cloud
drifting overhead was a fleeting swan, and so also was it in the creed
of the early Scandinavians and to our wild Navahoes—a good illustration
not only of independent and parallel images for an idea, but of the
likeness of human minds under great diversity of race and conditions.
Black clouds were thought of by the Norse folks as “ravens coursing over
the earth and returning to whisper the news in the ear of listening
Odin,” as Baring-Gould expresses it. The immemorial resemblance traced
between bird and cloud is not far-fetched: and recurs to the modern poet
as it did in olden times to the Psalmist when he spoke of the wings of
the wind. “The rushing vapor is the roc of the _Arabian Nights_, which
broods over its great luminous egg, the sun, and which haunts the
sparkling Valley of Diamonds, the starry sky.... If the cloud was
supposed to be a great bird, the lightnings were regarded as writhing
worms or serpents in its beak.... The lightning-bolt, shattering all it
struck, was regarded as the stone dropped by the cloud-bird.”[54]

In the _Kalevala_ Puhuri, the North Wind, father of Pakkanen, the Frost,
is sometimes personified as a gigantic eagle.

These facts and considerations prepare the way for legends that began to
be told in the very beginning of things, because then, and until
yesterday, all ordinary folks thought them true as well as interesting;
and they are repeated even now as curiosities of primitive faith—stories
of birds and plants called “openers.”

The oldest, perhaps, is the Rabbinical legend of Solomon, who desired to
obtain a stone-breaking “worm” (so the idea was even then ancient!) in
possession of Asmodeus, the Demon of Destruction. Asmodeus refused to
fetch it, and told Solomon that if he wanted this magic creature (whose
name was _schamir_) he must find the nest of “the,” not “a,” moorhen and
cover it with a plate of glass so that the mother-bird could not get
access to her young. This was done. When the moorhen returned and saw
the situation she flew away, brought the schamir from its hiding-place,
and was about to lay it on the glass, which it would break; but Benaiah,
Solomon’s agent, who lay in wait, shouted, and so frightened the bird
that she dropped the schamir, whereupon Benaiah picked it up, as he had
planned to do. It was by aid of this “worm,” which shaped the stone-work
for him, that Solomon was able to build his Temple without sound of
hammer or saw. Other versions assert that a raven or an eagle was the
bird, and that the magic glass-breaker was a stone brought from the
uttermost East.

The story travelled to Greece, and there became attached to the hoopoe,
a small crested bird that figures largely in south-European and African
wonder-tales. A hoopoe, runs the Greek story, had a nest in an old wall
in which was a crevice. The proprietor, noticing the rent in his wall,
plastered it over; thus when the hoopoe returned to feed her young she
found that the nest had been covered so that she was unable to enter it.

  Forthwith she flew away in quest of a plant called poa (the
  springwort?), and having found a spray returned and applied it to
  the plaster, which at once fell off from the crack and gave her free
  access to her nest. Then she went forth to seek food, but during her
  absence the master again plastered up the hole. The object was again
  removed by means of the magic poa, and a third time the hole was
  stopped and opened in the same way.

  The springwort and several other flowering plants were credited in
  old times with a magical property in opening locks. “Pliny records
  the superstition concerning it almost in the same form in which it
  is now found in Germany. If anyone touches a lock with it the lock,
  however strong, must yield.... One cannot easily find it oneself,
  but generally the woodpecker [according to Pliny, also the raven; in
  Switzerland and Swabia the hoopoe; in the Tyrol the swallow] will
  bring it under the following circumstances: When the bird visits its
  nest the nest must be stopped up with wood. The bird will open it by
  touching it with a spring-wurzel. Meantime a fire or a red cloth
  must be placed near by, which will so frighten the bird that it will
  let the magic root fall.”

The English antiquary Aubrey (1626–97) records an anecdote of a keeper
of a baronial park in Herefordshire who “did for exprinent’s sake drive
an iron naile thwert the hole of the woodpecker’s nest, there being a
tradition that the damme will bring some leafe to open it. He layed at
the bottom of the tree a cleane sheet, and before many houres passed the
naile came out, and he found a leafe lying by it on the sheet. They say
the moonwort will do such things.” The moonwort is a fern which was
formerly reputed to have power to draw nails out of horseshoes.

From such roots as these grew the superstitions and legends innumerable
of plants that would cure a snake (another lightning-symbol) or other
animal of wounds, or even restore the dead. A tradition of the Middle
Ages is that two little birds were seen fighting till one was exhausted.
“It went away and ate of a certain herb and then returned to renew the
battle. When the old man who witnessed the encounter had seen this done
several times he took away the herb on which the bird was wont to feed,
whereupon the little bird, unable to find its plant, set up a great cry
and died.” It is a foolish little story, but illustrative.

One reads of magic crystals, and of gems with marvellous properties that
would open mountains in which princes or glittering treasures were
hidden. A curious example of this is related by Leland[97] anent the
constant and ordinarily fruitless hunt for treasure in ancient Etruscan
tombs, which went on in Italy for centuries. “When one would find a
treasure,” the peasants told Leland, “he must take the door of the house
in which he dwells and carry it forth into the fields at night until he
comes to a tree. Then he must wait till many birds fly over him, and
when they come he must throw down the door, making a great noise. Then
the birds in fear will speak with a human voice, and tell where the
treasure is buried.”

Much of this tinctures the mental life of many uneducated persons to
this day. They will tell you now at Rauen, in Germany, that a princess
is entombed alive in the Markgrafenstein, and that she and her wealth
can be released only by one who will go there on a Friday at midnight
carrying a white woodpecker—which would seem to make an albino of that
species well worth searching for! The woodpecker of old was a
“lightning-bird” because, among other reasons, it was supposed to get
fire by boring into wood, as did primitive savages by means of the
fire-drill; and its red cap was not only a badge of its office, but a
lightning-symbol in general.

Let me illuminate this matter still more by quoting the comments of John
Fiske[98] on the mythical conceptions of this character that are so old,
and so cherished among the unlearned:

  Among the birds enumerated by Kuhn [author of _The Descent of Fire_]
  and others as representing the storm-cloud, are likewise the wren or
  kinglet (French _roitelet_); the owl, sacred to Athenæ; the cuckoo,
  stork and sparrow; and the red-breasted robin, whose name Robert was
  originally an epithet of the lightning-god Thor. In certain parts of
  France it is still believed that the robbing of a wren’s nest will
  render the culprit liable to be struck by lightning. The same belief
  was formerly entertained in Teutonic countries with respect to the
  robin....

  Now, as the raven or woodpecker, in the various myths of schamir, is
  the dark storm-cloud, so the rock-splitting worm, or plant or pebble
  is nothing more or less than the flash of lightning carried and
  dropped by the cloud....

  The persons who told these stories were not weaving ingenious
  allegories about thunder-storms, or giving utterance to
  superstitions of which the original meaning was forgotten. The old
  grannies who, along with a stoical indifference to the fate of
  quails and partridges, used to impress upon me the wickedness of
  killing robins, did not add that I should be struck by lightning if
  I failed to heed their admonitions. They had never heard that the
  robin was the bird of Thor: they merely rehearsed the remnant of the
  superstition which had survived to their own times, while the
  essential part of it had long since faded from recollection. The
  reason for regarding a robin’s life as more sacred than a
  partridge’s had been forgotten; but it left behind, as was natural,
  a vague recognition of that mythical sanctity. The primitive meaning
  of a myth fades away as inevitably as the primitive meaning of a
  word or phrase; and the rabbins which told of a worm which shattered
  rocks no more thought of the writhing thunderbolts than the modern
  reader thinks of oyster-shells when he sees the word _ostracism_, or
  consciously breathes a prayer when he writes the phrase _Good-bye_.

                              CHAPTER XIV
                    LEGENDS IN A HISTORICAL SETTING

It is not easy in preparing a book devoted mainly to fable and folklore
to sort out material for a separate chapter on “legends.” A legend may
be defined as a narrative of something thought of as having actually
happened in connection with some real purpose or place, but which is
unsupported by historical evidence. In many cases such narratives are
quite incredible, but even so they may have a historically illustrative,
a literary, or at least an amusing interest. Stories of a considerable
number of well-known kinds of birds are in this way connected with
actual persons, or with verifiable incidents of the past, and hence may
be said to be “legends in an historical setting.” A fair example of them
is the incident of the Capitoline geese.

Early in the third century before the Christian era a horde of Gaulish
invaders under Brennus over-ran central Italy, and in 388 B.C. captured
all of Rome itself except the lofty citadel called the Capitol, where a
Roman general officer, Marcus Manlius, held out with a small garrison on
the point of starvation. One night the besieging Gauls, having
discovered an unguarded by-path, crept up the rocky steep, intending the
surprise and capture of the almost worn-out defenders. “But,” says
Plutarch,[94] in Dryden’s translation, “there were sacred Geese kept
near the Temple of Juno, which at other times were plentifully fed, but
at this time, by reason of the Corn and all other Provisions were grown
strait, their allowance was shorten’d and they themselves in a poor and
lean condition. This Creature is by nature of quick sense, and
apprehensive of the least noise; so that besides watchful through
hunger, and restless, they immediately discovered the coming of the
Gauls; so that running up and down, with their noise and cackling they
raised the whole camp.”

Manlius sprang from sleep, aroused a body of soldiers and repelled the
attack. It was the beginning of an ultimate victory over the enemy. Rome
was saved, and in recognition of it Manlius was given the honorary title
Capitolinus, and for a long time afterward the incident was celebrated
annually by a procession to the Capitol in which a golden goose was
carried. Livy also tells us in his history that the prototype of this
golden symbol was a single sentinel goose never seen before, hence a
divine aid sent to Rome for the purpose by the gods. It is interesting
to note that

                  These consecrated geese in orders
                  That to the capitol were warders
                  And being then upon patrol
                  With noise alone beat off the Gaul,

as _Hudibras_ has it, were “sacred” to Juno, for this was before the
time when she, having changed from the status of simple wife to Jupiter
(and a model to human wives), had become the imperious and
trouble-making empress of later days, and had discarded the motherly
goose for the exotic, proud, and royally splendid peacock. This is a
capital example of the adaptive character of the assignment of birds to
the various demigods of the Roman pantheon; and it suggests the query
whether in some principal cases reverence for the bird itself did not
precede the conception of the divinity it afterward typified.

Another tale of birds acting as sentinels explains how the wren came to
be so mortally hated by the Irish, whose cruel “hunting of the wren” is
described in another chapter. According to Lady Wilde,[60] a student of
Irish folklore, this hatred is owing to the fact that once when Irish
troops were approaching to attack a part of Thomas Cromwell’s army
(about 1650) “wrens came and perched on the Irish drums, and by their
tapping and noise aroused the English soldiers, who fell on the Irish
troops and killed all of them.” This is a variant of a legend far older
than Cromwell’s campaigning; and it is not the true explanation of the
antipathy the cruder Irish and Manxmen still feel toward this innocent
little songster, while at the same time they have a peculiar tenderness
for the robin.

A third parallel is found in the annoyance caused the Scottish
Covenanters. Many a meeting of pious Presbyterians in some hidden,
heathery glen of the misty hills was discovered and roughly dispersed
“because of the hovering, bewailing plovers, fearful for their young,
clamoring overhead.” The poet Leyden alludes to the long-remembered
grudge against this suspicious bird when, speaking of the religious
refugees on the moors, he writes:

          The lapwing’s clamorous whoop attends their flight,
          Pursues their steps where’er the wanderers go,
          Till the shrill scream betrays them to the foe.

Returning to ancient history, two bird-stories of Alexander the Great
are delightful as illustrating how an independent and masterful
intellect, even in that early day above the Pagan superstitions of the
time, might with ingenuity and boldness bend the sanctions of religion
to his own ends without destroying them. The first one is an incident
recorded of Alexander’s campaign in Asia Minor in 334 B.C. His fleet
was anchored in the harbor of Miletus, and opposite it lay the fleet
of the Persians. Alexander had no desire to disturb this situation,
for he meant his army, not the navy, to do the work in view. One day
an eagle, Jove’s bird, was seen sitting on the shore behind the
Macedonian ships, and Parmenion, chief of staff, found in this fact
convincing indication by the gods that victory was with the ships.
Alexander pointed out that the eagle had perched on the land, not on
the ships, giving thereby the evident intimation that it was only
through the victory of the troops on land that the fleet could have
value. As Alexander was commander-in-chief, this was evidently the
orthodox interpretation.

Two years later Alexander was one day laying out on its site the plan of
his foreordained city of Alexandria, in Egypt, and was marking the
course of the proposed streets by sprinkling lines of flour in the lack
of chalk-dust. “While the king,” says Plutarch, “was congratulating
himself on his plan, on a sudden a countless number of birds of various
sorts flew over from the land and the lake in clouds, and settling on
the spot in clouds devoured in a short time all the flour, so that
Alexander was much disturbed in mind at the omen involved, till the
augurs restored his confidence, telling him the city ... was destined to
be rich in its resources, and a feeder of nations of men.”

The straight face with which Plutarch[94] recites these and similar
stories of hocus-pocus in the matter of inconvenient omens is
delightful; but the faith of the common people was not so easily shaken.
For example: When the Sicilian-Greek army of Agathocles, Tyrant of
Syracuse in the third century, B. C., was facing near Times a more
powerful Carthaginian force, Agathocles let loose a number of owls among
his men, “who suddenly took great courage as the birds sacred to Pallas
settled blinking upon their helmets and shields”—and they routed the
bigger enemy. That was true religious inspiration—as true as ever blazed
in the heart of Christian crusader; but it was a sacrilegious trick on
the part of Agathocles!

Just across the strait from Sicily, at Regium (Reggio), was the home of
the celebrated cranes of Ibycus. Ibycus, a local poet, was being
murdered by robbers when he called on the cranes fluttering near by to
give witness of his death. Later, the murderers were one day at the
theatre, when they saw a flock of cranes, and in fright whispered to one
another: “The cranes of Ibycus!” They were overheard, arrested and
executed, whence the proverb “the cranes of Ibycus” to express crime
coming unexpectedly to light.

_The Wonderful Magazine_, an amazing periodical issued in London from
1793 to 1798, contained a story that in 1422 a “Roman” emperor besieging
Zeta took all the sparrows his men could catch, and, tying lighted
matches to their feet, let them go toward the town. But the citizens
made a great noise, and the frightened sparrows flying back set the
Roman camp on fire and so raised the siege. The reader may put his own
estimate on this bit of historical lore; and may discover, if he can,
where and what was Zeta.

Arabs in Palestine tell how a bird was involved in David’s sin of
coveting Uriah’s wife. David, they say, had shut himself up in a tower
for meditation, when, happening to look up, he saw just outside the
window a bird of amazing beauty—a pigeon whose plumage gleamed like gold
and jewels. David threw some crumbs on the floor, whereupon the pigeon
came in and picked them up, but eluded David’s attempt to capture it. At
last, to escape his efforts, it flew to the window and settled on one of
the bars. He pursued, but it departed. It was then, as David followed
the bright creature with longing eyes, that he caught sight of Madame
Uriah in the bath—and was done for!

Among other excellent things in Hanauer’s _Tales from Palestine_[43] is
the following report of Solomon’s contest with a dove:

“In the southern wall of the Kubbet ’es-Sakhra [at Jerusalem], the
mosque that now stands near the site of the ancient Temple, on the right
side of the door as one enters there is a gray slab framed in marble of
a dark color. It contains a figure, formed by natural veins in the
stone, which is distinct enough to be taken for a picture of two doves
perched facing each other on the edge of a vase. With this picture is
connected a tale....

“The great king Solomon understood the language of beasts, birds and
fishes, and, when he had occasion to do so, would converse with all of
them. One day, soon after he had completed the Temple, as he was
standing at a window of the royal palace, he overheard a conversation
between a pair of birds that were sitting on the housetop. Presently the
male, who was evidently trying to impress the female with his
importance, exclaimed: ‘Solomon is a conceited fool! Why should he be so
vain of this pile of buildings he has raised? I, if I wished, could kick
them all over in a few minutes.’

“The king, greatly enraged by this pompous speech, summoned the offender
into his presence and demanded what he meant by such an outrageous
boast. ‘Your majesty,’ replied the bird, ‘will, I am sure, forgive my
audacity, when I explain that I was in the company of a female; since
your majesty doubtless knows from experience that in such circumstances
the temptation to boast is almost irresistible.’ The monarch, forgetting
his anger in his amusement, said with a smile: ‘Go your way this time,
but see that you do not repeat the offence,’ and the bird, after a
profound obeisance, flew away to rejoin his mate.

“He had hardly alighted before the female, unable to repress her
curiosity, eagerly inquired why he had been summoned to the palace.
‘Oh,’ said the impudent boaster, ‘the king heard me tell you that if I
chose I could kick down all his buildings in no time, and he sent for me
to beg me not to do it.’

“Solomon, who, of course, heard this remark also, was so indignant at
the incorrigible vanity of its author that he at once turned both birds
into stone. They remain to this day as a reminder of the saying: ‘The
peace of mankind consists in guarding the tongue.’”

But the stories of Solomon and his bird-friends are many. He was
evidently a jolly old soul, and tradition says that when he travelled
across the desert clouds of birds formed a canopy to protect him from
the sun. The hoopoe, a high-crested bird that figures largely in other
fanciful tales of the East, tells wise Solomonic stories, and is still
regarded by Saharan nomads as possessed of peculiar virtues. The great
Jewish king, whose reality is almost hidden under the legendary mantle,
is said to have chosen the hoopoe, the cock and the pewit: the first
because of its wit, the second in admiration of its cry, and the third
because, says Hanauer, it can see through the earth, and could tell him
where fountains of water could be found. The last preference is natural
in an arid region, the pewit being a water-bird, the familiar
lapwing-plover; and as it annually migrates through Palestine into
Ethiopia it is reasonable that it should be fabled to be the means of
bringing Solomon and the Queen of Sheba together, as is described in
Chapter XXVII of the Koran. It should be noted that all of these birds
are crested.

The veneration given to doves by the Mohammedans at Mecca is accounted
for elsewhere; but swallows are held in almost equal reverence by both
officials and pilgrims at that great shrine of Islam, and build their
nests in the haram. This respect is explained by Keane[14] as the result
of a belief that they were the instruments by which Mecca was saved from
the Abyssinian (Christian) army that is known to have invaded Arabia in
the year of Mohammed’s birth, and to have been disastrously expelled.
The tradition is that God sent flocks of swallows, every bird carrying
three small stones in its beak and two in its claws, which were dropped
on the heads of the Abyssinians, and miraculously penetrated the bodies
of men and elephants until only one of the invaders was left alive. He
fled back to his country, and had just finished telling of the disaster
to the king when one of the swallows, which had followed him from Mecca,
dropped its pebble and killed him too. The kernel of this dramatic story
is in the nineteenth section of the Koran:[59] “And he sent against them
birds in flocks (ababils), claystones did he hurl down at them.” The
historical explanation is that the Abyssinian invaders were destroyed by
small-pox, the pustules of which are called in Arabic by a word meaning
“small stones.”

Of a piece with these traditions and the Rabbinical tales of the Jews
are the monkish legends preserved in early British chronicles, such as
that by the Venerable Bede or by William of Malmesbury. The orthodox as
well as dissenters had trouble with birds. Among the traditions of the
celebrated Scotch-Irish missionary Columba (Latinized from his baptismal
name Colum, “dove”) is one that once in his ardent youth Colum was
trying to make by stealth in a church a copy of the psalter in
possession of the selfish king, Finian of Donegal, who had refused the
young enthusiast that privilege. A meddlesome stork, confined within the
church, informed the sacristan, and Colum was arrested. Nevertheless by
divine aid he got his copy, helpful to him afterward in his beneficent
work in the Scottish highlands.

One of the prettiest of these old stories is that of St. Kenneth and the
gulls.[22] One day about A. D. 550 the blackheaded gulls, flying as
usual along the coast of Wales, and scanning the sea sharply for food or
anything else interesting to a gull, found floating in a coracle—a
round, wickerwork canoe—a human baby a day or two old, contentedly
asleep on a pallet made of a folded purple cloth. Several gulls seized
the corners of this cloth and so carried the child to the ledge of the
Welsh cliff where they nested, plucked feathers from their breasts to
make a soft bed, laid the baby on it, then hastened to fly inland and
bring a doe to provide it with milk, for which an angel offered a brazen
bell as a cup. There the blessed waif lived for several months; but one
day, in the absence of all the gulls, a shepherd discovered the infant
and took him down to his hut and his kind wife. The gulls, returning
from the sea, heard of this act from the doe. They at once rushed to the
shepherd’s cottage, again lifted the babe by the corners of its purple
blanket, and bore him back to the ledge of their sea-fronting crag.
There he stayed until he had grown to manhood—a man full of laughter and
singing and kind words; and the Welsh peasants of the Gower Peninsula
revered him and called him Saint Kenneth.

Somewhat similar is the legendary history of Coemagen, or Saint Kelvin,
an Irish monk of the eighth century, into whose charge was committed the
infant son of Colman, a Leinster noble. “Coemagen fed the child on the
milk of a doe which came from the forest to the door of his cell. A
raven was wont, after the doe had been milked, to perch on the bowl, and
sometimes would upset it. ‘Bad luck to thee!’ exclaimed the saint. ‘When
I am dead there will be a famous wake, but no scraps for thee and thy
clan!’ When very old St. Kelvin moved into a forest hermitage, where the
birds came to him as companions. Once, while praying, his supplicating
palms outstretched, a blackbird (thrush) dropped her eggs into the
hollow of his hands, and he held his arms rigid until the chicks
hatched.”

A curious parallel to the last incident is quoted by the Baroness
Martinengo-Caesaresco[20] “from an industrious translator” of the book
_Tatchi-Lou-Lun_, describing how when a bird laid her eggs on the head
of the first Buddha, which she mistook for the branch of a tree, he
plunged himself into a trance so as not to move until the eggs had
hatched and the young were flown.

St. Bede the younger, a contemporary of Coemagen, had a dove that used
to come at his call; and an Irish monk, Comgall, would bid the swans
near his residence come and cluster devotionally around his feet. Many
saints, the legends declare, had authority over birds, and one, St.
Millburg, abbess of Wenlock, in Shropshire, kept them out of the
farmers’ crops by telling them it was naughty to despoil the grain. Of
old, according to Canon Kingsley, St. Guthlac in Crowland said, as the
swallows sat upon his knee, “He who leads his life according to the will
of God, to him will the wild deer and the wild birds draw more near.”

The religious “hermits,” so prevalent at that period, were men who chose
a more or less solitary life, quite as much, I suspect, on account of
their love of nature as from purely devotional motives, and this was
particularly true of those in Great Britain, exhibiting the
characteristic British fondness for animal life. There was an early St.
Bartholomew, for example, who in the sixth century or thereabout dwelt
in seclusion on one of the Farne Islands off the northeastern coast of
England, and made friends of the gulls and cormorants of the place. One
of these he had tamed to eat out of his hand, and once, when Bartholomew
was away fishing, a hawk pursued this poor bird into the chapel and
killed it. Brother Bartholomew came in and found the hawk there with
bloody talons and a shame-faced appearance. He caught it, kept it two
days without food to punish it, then let it go. At another time, as he
sat by the shore, a cormorant approached and pulled at his skirt, then
led him to where one of its young had fallen into a crevice of the rocks
whence the good man rescued it.

One of these rocky islets in the North Sea became so famous during the
next century that it has been known ever since as Holy Isle, and the
ruins of its monastery and cathedral still remain and may be seen from
the railway train as it passes along the brink of the lofty coast a
little south of Berwick-on-Tweed. This was the seat of the renowned
Bishop Cuthbert of whom many quaint stories are told, apart from the
record of his religious work. They attribute to his influence the
extraordinary gentleness and familiarity characteristic of the eider
duck, which is known to this day in Northumbria as Cuthbert’s bird. It
was he, according to a narrative of a monk of the 13th century, who
inspired these ducks with a hereditary trust in mankind by taking them
as companions of his solitude when for several years he resided alone on
Lindisfarne. There is good reason to accept this and similar traditions
as largely true, for a like ability in “gentling” birds and other wild
animals is manifested to-day by some persons of a calm and kindly sort.

Early in the eighth century a monk of intensely ascetic disposition,
named Guthlac, retired to a solitary hermitage on an island in the
dismal morasses of Lincolnshire, which afterward, if not then, was
called Croyland or Crowland. He was sorely tempted by the Devil we are
informed, and had many battles with “demons”—native British refugees
hiding in the fens; but in the intervals of his fasting and fighting he
got acquainted with the wild creatures about him. “The ravens, the
beasts and the fishes,” says the record, “came to obey him. Once a
venerable brother named Wilfred visited him, and ... suddenly two
swallows came flying in ... and often they sat fearlessly on the
shoulders of the holy man Guthlac, and then lifted up their song, and
afterward they sat on his bosom and on his arms and his knees.... When
Guthlac died angelic songs were heard in the sky, and all the air had a
wondrous odor of exceeding sweetness.”

St. Kentigern, when a schoolboy, was wrongly accused of having twisted
off the head of his master’s pet robin. He proved his innocence by
putting the head and body together, whereupon the robin came to life and
attended Kentigern until he became a great and good man. His master was
St. Servan, and the robin was one that used to eat from his hand and
perch on his shoulder, where it would twitter whenever Servan chanted
the Psalms.

Here we encounter the mystical kind of story with which those old
chroniclers like to embellish their biographies of holy men, and there
was no limit to their credulity. Such is the tale of Carilef, a French
would-be hermit of Ménàt, in Auvergne, who thought he was guided to set
up a religious station because a wren had laid an egg in a hood that he
had left hanging on a bush—a very wrenlike proceeding; and that was the
foundation of the monastery about which the city of St. Calais grew in
later times. Several other incidents of this kind are on record, showing
that the value placed on any action by a bird that could be construed as
a divine message. It is written that Editha, one of the early queens of
England, persuaded her husband to found a religious house near Oxford on
account of the omens she interpreted from the voice and actions of a
certain magpie. Similarly the site for the abbey of Thierry, near
Rheims, in France, was indicated to St. Theodoric, in the sixth century,
by a white eagle circling around the top of the hill on which it
subsequently was erected; and this miraculous eagle was seen year after
year in the sky above it.

About that time Kenelm, son and heir of Kenulph, king of Wessex, was
seven years old. His sister, who wanted to succeed to the throne in his
place, procured his murder. The instant this was accomplished the fact
was notified to the Pope, according to the _Chronicles_ of Roger de
Wendover, by a white dove that alighted on the altar of St. Peter’s,
bearing in its beak a scroll on which was written

                 In Clent cow-pasture, under a thorn,
                 Of head bereft lies Kenelm, king-born.

The Pope sent word to England, the body was found in a thicket over
which hung a pillar of supernal light, and was taken to Winchelcumb, in
Gloucestershire, for burial; and at the spot near Halesowen, in
Shropshire, where he was killed, Kenelm’s Chapel was erected.

But the most mystical legend in which birds are a part, is one familiar
in Brittany. It is related of St. Leonore, a Welsh missionary who went
to Brittany in the sixth century, to whom many fabulous powers and deeds
are attributed, the most comprehensible of which Baring-Gould has put
into verse. Leonore, with a band of followers, had decided to settle in
Brittany on a desolate moor; but they had forgotten to bring any
seed-wheat, and were alarmed.

              Said the abbot, “God will help us
                In this hour of bitter loss.”
              Then one spied a little redbreast
                Sitting on a wayside cross.

              Doubtless came the bird in answer
                To the words the monk did speak,
              For a heavy wheat-ear dangled
                From the robin’s polished beak.

              Then the brothers, as he dropped it
                Picked it up and careful sowed;
              And abundantly in autumn
                Reaped the harvest where they strewed.[21]

Greater poets than Baring-Gould or even Bishop Trench have found
literary material in these monastic tales. Witness Longfellow’s _Golden
Legend_, where he sings of good St. Felix, the Burgundian missionary who
crossed the Channel, and in A.D. 604 converted to Christianity the wild
king of the East Saxons; and who listened to the singing of a milk-white
bird for a hundred years, although it had seemed to him but an hour, so
enchanted was he with the music. No doubt myth-mongers might discourse
very scientifically on this and some other of these episodes in the
penumbra of history, but we will leave the pleasure of it to them.

None of these traditions of early bird-lovers and teachers of kindness
are so pleasant as are those inspired by the gracious life of St.
Francis.[22] A familiar classic is his sermon to the birds when

                 Around Assisi’s convent gate
                 The birds, God’s poor who cannot wait,
                 From moor and mere and darksome wood
                 Came flocking for their dole of food.

One of the prettiest Franciscan stories is that of the saint and the
nightingale as presented by Mrs. Jamieson;[105] and, by the way,
antiphonal singing with birds is related of several holy men and women
of old:

  As he was sitting with his disciple Leo, he felt himself penetrated
  with joy and consolation by the song of the nightingale ... and
  Francis began to sing, and when he stopped the nightingale took up
  the strain; and thus they sang alternately until the night was far
  advanced and Francis was obliged to stop for his voice failed. Then
  he confessed that the little bird had vanquished him. He called it
  to him, thanked it for its song, and gave it the remainder of his
  bread; and having bestowed his blessing upon it the creature flew
  away.

Longfellow has preserved in melodious verse that legend of the Spanish
Charles V and the swallow that chose his tent as a site for its nest at
a time when the emperor—

                  I forget in what campaign,
                  Long besieged in mud and rain
                  Some old frontier town of Flanders.

                  Yes, it was a swallow’s nest,
                    Built of clay and hair of horse’s
                  Mane, or tail, or dragoon’s crest,
                  Found on hedgerows east and west
                    After skirmish of the forces.

The headquarters staff were scandalized by the bird’s impudence, but
Charles forbade their malice:

                   “Let no hand the bird molest,”
                   Said he solemnly, “nor hurt her!”
                 Adding then, by way of jest,
                   “Golondrina is my guest,
                   ’Tis the wife, of some deserter!”

                 So unharmed and unafraid
                   Sat the swallow still and brooded,
                 Till the constant cannonade
                 Through the walls a breach had made,
                   And the siege was thus concluded.

                 Then the army elsewhere bent
                   Struck the tents as if disbanding,
                 Only not the Emperor’s tent.
                 For he ordered as he went,
                   Very curtly, “Leave it standing.”

                 So it stood there all alone,
                   Loosely flapping, torn and tattered,
                 Till the brood was fledged and flown,
                 Swinging o’er those walks of stone
                   Which the cannon-shot had shattered.

                               CHAPTER XV
                       SOME PRETTY INDIAN STORIES

Not many of the stories about birds now or formerly current among the
American aborigines are of a pleasing character. They are fantastic
myths for the most part, as appears from many of the incidents given
elsewhere in this book; and often they are so wildly improbable,
incoherent, and unbirdlike as to disgust rather than interest us. That
is partly owing, no doubt, to our difficulty in taking the native point
of view, and our ignorance of the significance the half-animal,
half-human characters in the tales have to the redmen, with whom, in
most cases, the startling narratives pass for veritable tribal history.
Their stories are as foreign to our minds as is their “tum-tum” music to
our ears. Now and then, however, we come across an understanding and
pleasing legend, of purely native origin, and touched with poetic
feeling.

A favorite story among the central Eskimos, for instance, is that of
their race-mother Sedna, who was the daughter of a chief, and was wooed
by a fulmar (a kind of northern petrel) who promised her, if she would
marry him, a delightful life in his distant home. So she went away with
him. But she had been ruefully deceived, and was cruelly mistreated. A
year later her father went to pay her a visit; and discovering her
misery he killed her husband and took his repentant daughter home. The
other fulmars in the village followed them, mourning and crying for
their murdered fellow, and fulmars continue to utter doleful cries to
this day.

Another Eskimo tale relates that a loon told a poor blind boy that he
could cure him of his affliction. So the boy crept after the bird to a
lake, where the loon took him and dived with him into the water. Three
times they repeated their submergence, the last time staying a long time
under the water, but when the boy came to the surface after the third
diving he had good eyesight. This seems one of the rare examples of a
tale told simply for its own sake, and free of any esoteric
significance.

A very pretty legend, current among the Eskimos of western Alaska, has
been preserved for us by Edward W. Nelson,[101] who spent several years,
late in the 19th century, in studying the ornithology and ethnology of
the Bering Sea region. It relates to the redpolls, the most abundant and
entertaining land-birds of Alaska, where it would be a surprisingly hard
heart that was not touched by their companionship as winter closes down
on a dreary landscape of snow-drifts. Let me quote Mr. Nelson’s words:

  At this season the stars seem each to hang from the firmament by an
  invisible cord, and twinkle clear and bright overhead. The sharp,
  querulous yelp of the white fox alone breaks the intense stillness.
  A white, frosty fog hangs in the air—the chilled breath of
  nature—which falls silently to the ground in the lovely crystal
  handiwork of northern genii. In the north a pale auroral arch moves
  its mysterious banners, and the rounding bosom of the earth, chill
  under its white mantle, looks dreary and sad. After such a night the
  sun seems to creep reluctantly above the horizon, as though loath to
  face the bitter cold. The smoke rises slowly and heavily in the
  fixed atmosphere, and warm rooms are doubly appreciated.

  Soon small troops of these little redpolls come ... flitting about
  the houses on all sides, examining the bare spots on the ground,
  searching the old weeds and fences, clinging to the eaves, and even
  coming to the window-sills, whence they peer saucily in, making
  themselves continually at home, and receiving a hearty welcome for
  their cheering presence. The breast is now a beautiful peach-blossom
  pink, and the crown shining scarlet. How this bird came to bear
  these beautiful colors is told in one of the Indian myths ... which
  begins thus:

  Very long ago the whole of mankind was living in cheerless
  obscurity. Endless night hid the face of the world, and men were
  without the power of making a fire, as all the fire of the world was
  in the possession of a ferocious bear living in a far-off country to
  the north. The bear guarded his charge with unceasing vigilance, and
  so frightful was his appearance that no man dared attempt to obtain
  any of the precious substance. While the poor Indians were sorrowing
  over their misfortunes the redpoll, which at that time was a plain
  little wood-sparrow, dressed in ordinary dull brown, heard their
  plaint—for in those days men and beasts understood one another,—and
  his heart was touched. He prepared himself for a long journey and
  set out toward the lodge of the cruel bear. After many adventures
  ... he reached the place, and by a successful ruse stole a living
  ember from the perpetual fire which glowed close under the breast of
  the savage guardian, and flew away back with it in his beak. The
  glow of the coal was reflected from his breast and crown, while his
  forehead became slightly burned. Far away he flew, and finally
  arrived safely at the home of mankind, and was received with great
  rejoicing.

  He gave the fire to the grateful people and told them to guard it
  well; and as he did so they noticed the rich glow on his breast and
  brow, and said: “Kind bird, wear forever that beautiful mark as a
  memento of what you have done for us;” and to this day the redpoll
  wears this badge in proof of the legend, as all may see, and mankind
  has ever since had fire.

One might gather a considerable collection of historical anecdotes
relating to birds that in one way or another aided the Indians of old to
obtain or to preserve fire, and some of them are noted incidentally
elsewhere in this volume; but few are as poetic and entertaining as Mr.
Nelson’s contribution.

The late Charles G. Leland found among the Algonkins of Maine and
eastward a great number of tales that he put into his books. One or two
of them are about birds, and these he threw into verse and published
them in a volume entitled _Kuloskap the Master_.[91] The longest and
most romantic of these is the love-story of the Leaf for the Red Bird
(scarlet tanager), quoted in part below:

            In the earliest time on the greatest mountain
            Lived merry Mipis, the little leaf ...
            Listens all day to the birds and the breezes,
            And goes to sleep to the song of the owl.

            Merry Mipis on a bright May morning
            Was stretching himself in the warm sunshine
            When he heard afar a wonderful music,
            A sound like a flute and the voice of a maiden,
            Rippling melodies melting in one.
            Never before had he heard such singing.
            Then looking up he beheld before him
            A beautiful merry little bird-girl,
            Dressed in garments of brilliant scarlet,
            Just like his own in the Indian summer.
            “O fairest of small birds,” said merry Mipis,
            “Who are you, and what is your name?”
            Thus she answered: “I am Squ’tes,
            The Little Fire....
            I have lived in the deep green forest,
            Even as you have for many ages,
            Singing my songs to K’musom’n,
            Unto our Father the mighty mountain;
            And, because he well loved my music,
            For a reward he sent me hither
            To seek a youth whose name is Mipis,
            Whom he wills that I should wed.”

This unexpected and rather unmaidenly avowal rather startled Mipis, and
made him suspicious of some trickery, despite the attraction of her
charm; but Squ’tes, “never heeding what the leaf thought,” began again—

               Pouring out in the pleasant sunshine
               Her morning song. As Mipis listened
               To the melodious trill he melted;
               For the sweet tune filled all the forest,
               Every leaf on the tree was listening....
               And as the music grew tender and stronger,
               And as in one long soft note it ended,
               Little Leaf said to her: “Be my own.”
               So in the greenwood they lived together.

One day both go to the Mountain and thank him for their happiness; and
in the course of the visit the grandsire warns them not to go away from
the Mountain, for dangers fill the outside world, thus:

             The little Indian boy Monimquess,
             Who, armed with a terrible bow and arrows,
             Shoots all of the little birds of the forest;

and—

               Aplasemwesit, the Little Whirlwind,
               Who never rests. He is always trying
               To blow the leaves away from the branches.

So they built their nest on the great tree that grew “in the safest
place in all the mountain,” and for a time continued in bliss; but Mipis
could see from their lofty home a far, beautiful country, and wanted to
visit it. So Red Bird took the discontented Little Leaf in her bill and
bore him away into the delightful lowland, where again they built a
home; but here the Indian boy heard the wonderful singing, and shot the
singer, and Little Whirlwind seized Mipis and took him to his grandsire,
the Storm, who resolved to keep Mipis as a prisoner. That night the
Mountain dreamed of this, and sent his son to demand Mipis, and the
Storm gave him up, so that soon Little Leaf was back on his safe
mountain-tree—but he lived in lonely grief.

               His life was gone with the Little Fire,
               And the fire of his life was all in ashes.

How then had it fared with the lost Red Bird? When she fell under the
boy’s arrow she was not killed but sorely wounded; and when the young
Indian carried her home, very proud of his prize, his grandsire said
truly that the bird must be kept captive. Red Bird recovered rapidly,
and one morning Monimquess was dismayed to hear her singing as loudly as
possible, “like a brook to sunshine,” as he thought, for he knew she was
trying to make herself heard by the Mountain, and that if she succeeded
destruction would be hurled upon the wigwam. At last, wearied with
anxious thinking—

         Down by the fire he lay on a bearskin
         Smoking himself into silent sleep.
         The door was closed, nor was there a crevice
         Through which the Red Bird could creep to freedom,
         When all at once she thought of the opening
         Through which the smoke from the fire ascended,
         Ever upward so densely pouring
         Nobody dreamed she would dare to pass it.

         As the head of Monimquess drooped on his shoulder....
         Softly the Red Bird rose, and taking
         A birchen bucket filled it with water.
         Dipping her wing in the water she sprayed it
         Little by little upon the fire.
         Little by little the fire, like Monimquess,
         Sank to sleep, and the bright red flame
         Lay down to rest in the dull gray ashes.
         Out of the smoke-hole, in careful silence,
         Flitted Squ’tes....

So the lovers were reunited. Then

             ... Squ’tes and Mipis
             Lived all the summer upon the mountain,
             Sung in its shadows and shone in the sunshine.
             Still as of yore they are singing and shining;
             And so it will be while the mountain is there.

A very curious feature of this delicate romance, which reminds one of
the love-story of the Nightingale and the Rose, is the transposition of
sex. To our minds it would seem natural that the bird, as the most
active of the two characters, should take the male part and the leaf the
other; and it is false to fact that Red Bird, as a female, should
_sing_. The Indians must have known that this was unnatural, yet their
poetic sense arranged it otherwise, just as the poets have pictured the
nightingale pressing _her_ breast against a thorn, yet singing, as only
male birds do!

Elsewhere I have shown how important a part the loon plays in the
mythology and fireside tales of the redmen of the Northeastern region of
our country and that of the Great Lakes. To the Algonkins of Maine and
eastward this bird was the messenger of their great hero Glooscap, or
Kuloskap, as Leland spells it with careful accuracy when writing in the
language of the Pasamaquoddies; and he has told in verse the story of
how this service was accepted by the willing bird. One day when Kuloskap
was pursuing the gigantic magician, Winpe, his enemy, a flock of loons
came circling near him, and to his question to their leader: “What is
thy will, O Kwimu?” the loon replied: “I fain would be thy servant, thy
servant and thy friend.” Then the Master taught the loons a cry, a
strange, prolonged cry, like the howl of a dog when he calls to the
moon, or when, far away in the forest, he seeks to find his master; and
he instructed them to utter this weird summons whenever they required
him.

  Now it came to pass long after, the Master in Uktakumkuk
  (The which is Newfoundland) came to an Indian village,
  And all who dwelt therein were Kwimuuk, who had been
  Loons in the time before. And now they were very glad
  As men to see once more the Master, who had blessed them
  When they were only birds. Therefore he made them his huntsmen.
  Also his messengers. Hence comes that in all the stories
  Which are told of the mighty Master the loons are ever his friends;
  And the Indians, when they hear the cry of the loons, exclaim:
  “Kimu elkomtuejul Kuloskapul”—the Loon is calling
  Kuloskap, the Master.

Leith Adams[103] says: “Stories are told”—among the Micmacs in New
Brunswick—“how the snowy owl still laments the Golden Age when man and
all animals lived in perfect amity until it came to pass that they began
to quarrel; when the great Glooscap, or Gotescarp, got disgusted and
sailed across the seas to return when they made up their differences. So
every night the owl repeats to this day his _Koo, koo, skoos_. ‘Oh, I am
sorry, Oh, I am sorry.’”

A quaint little legend comes from the Tillamooks, whose home was
formerly on the Oregon coast, where the tides do not rise very much. In
the beginning of the world, it teaches, the crow had a voice like that
of the thunder-bird, and the thunder-bird the voice of a crow. The
latter proposed to exchange voices. The crow agreed to this, but
demanded that in return the thunder-bird give her low water along the
seashore, so that she might more easily gather the clams and other
mussels, which was a part of a Tillamook woman’s daily task. The
thunder-bird therefore made the water draw back a very long distance.
But when the crow went out on the waste of sea-bottom she saw so many
marine monsters that she was frightened, and begged the thunder-bird not
to make the waters recede so far; and that is the reason that now but
little ocean-bottom is exposed at ebb tide on the Oregon coast.

The Gualala Indians were a tribe of the great Pomo family that half a
century ago dwelt happily in the northwestern corner of Sonoma County,
California, and their staple food was the flour of crushed and filtered
acorns of several kinds of oaks. In their country, as elsewhere in that
State, the California woodpecker (_Melanerpes_) is a very common bird,
which has the habit of drilling numerous small holes in pines and other
soft-wooded trees, and fixing in each an acorn—a method of storing its
favorite food against a time of famine. The Indians understood this very
well, and in times of scarcity of food in camp they would cut down the
small trees and climb the big ones, and rob the cupboards of the far
more provident birds. “And here,” says Powers,[19] “I will make mention
of a kind of sylvan barometer.... These acorns are stored away before
the rainy season sets in, sometimes to the amount of a half-bushel, and
when they are wetted they presently swell and start out a little. So
always, when a rainstorm is brewing, the woodpeckers fall to work with
great industry a day or two in advance and hammer them in all tight.
During the winter, therefore, whenever the woods are heard rattling with
the pecking of these busy little commissary-clerks heading up their
barrels of worms, the Indian knows a rainstorm is certain to follow.”

The Chippeway Indians, as Schoolcraft noted, account for the friendly
spirit of the robin by relating that he was once a young brave whose
father set him a task too cruel for his strength, and made him starve
too long when he had reached man’s estate and had to go through the
customary initiation-ceremonies. He turned into a robin, and said to his
father: “I shall always be the friend of man and keep near their
dwellings. I could not gratify your pride as a warrior, but I will cheer
you by songs.”

This pretty fiction is noteworthy, when one recalls the many instances
in Greek and European myths and poetry of men and women transforming
themselves into birds.

The Cherokees had an interesting story about the wren, always a
busybody. She gets up early in the morning, they say, pries into
everything, and goes around to every lodge in the settlement to get news
for the birds’ council. When a new baby is born she finds out whether it
is a boy or a girl, and reports to the council. If it is a boy the birds
sing in mournful chorus: “Alas! The whistle of the arrow! My shins will
burn,” for the birds know that when the boy grows older he will hunt
them with his blowgun and arrows, and roast them on a stick. But if the
baby is a girl they are glad, and sing: “Thanks! The sound of the
pestle! At her home I shall surely be able to scratch where she sweeps,”
because they know that after a while they will be able to pick up stray
grains where she beats the corn into meal.[104]

In the myths or folklore of the Pawnees a character in several tales, as
related by Grinnell,[105] is a little bird, smaller than a pigeon. “Its
back is blue, but its breast white, and its head is spotted. It flies
swiftly over the water, and when it sees a fish it dives down into the
water to catch it. This bird is a servant or a messenger for the
Nahurac.” The Nahurac are an assemblage of imaginary animals by whom
many wonderful things are done; and it communicates to living men their
wishes or orders, and acts as a guide when men are summoned to come or
go somewhere. But this is perilously near the purely mythical, and it is
mentioned only as an example of the widespread conception of birds as
messengers and interpreters.

I hope I may be pardoned if I add to this group of Indian bird-stories
one or two told in the Negro cabins of North Carolina, and probably
elsewhere, and written down in Volume XI of the American _Folk-Lore
Journal_, among many other tales of the out-door creatures to which the
rural darkies like to attribute human attributes, and to use as puppets
in their little comedies of animal life, which are likely to be keen
satires on humanity. The one to be quoted is a parable of how Ann Nancy
(a spider) got caught in a tight place by Mr. Turkey Buzzard, and how
she escaped, for Mr. Buzzard was going to eat her.

“But,” says the narrator, “she beg so hard, and compliment his fine
presence, and compare how he sail in the clouds while she ’bliged to
crawl in the dirt, till he that proudful and set up he feel mighty
pardonin’ spirit, and he let her go.”

Ann Nancy, however, did not enjoy the incident, and “jess study constant
how she gwine get the best of every creeter,” and particularly of the
tormenting bird.

“She knew Mr. Buzzard’s weak point am he stomach, and one day she make
it out dat she make a dining, and ’vite Mr. Buzzard an’ Miss Buzzard an’
de chillens. Ann Nancy she know how to set out a dinin’ fo’ sure, and
when dey all got sot down to the table, an’ she mighty busy passin’ the
hot coffee to Mr. Buzzard an’ the little Buzzards, she have a powerful
big pot o’ scalding water ready, and she lip it all over poor ol’ Mr.
Buzzard’s haid, and the po’ ol’ man done been baldhaided from that day.

“An’ he don’t forget on Ann Nancy, ’cause you ’serve she de onliest
creeter on the topside the earth what Mr. Buzzard don’t eat.”

                       LIST OF BOOKS REFERRED TO

 1. HALLIDAY, WILLIAM R. Greek Divination. (London, 1913.)

 2. YOUNG, MARTHA. Plantation Bird Legends. (New York, 1902.)

 3. WORCESTER, DEAN. The Philippines. (New York, 1901.)

 4. BRINTON, DANIEL G. The Religions of Primitive Peoples. (New York,
  1897.)

 5. DORSEY, J. OWEN. Report U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, 1884–5.
  (Washington, 1888.)

 6. MCGEE, W. J. The Seri Indians, in Report U. S. Bureau Ethnology,
  1895–6, Part I.

 7. SKEAT, WILLIAM W. Malay Magic. (London, 1900.)

 8. GAY, JOHN. Poems. The Shepherd’s Week. (Boston, 1854.)

 9. HIGGINSON, THOMAS W. Army Life in a Black Regiment. (Boston, 1870.)

10. SWANN, JAMES G. The Northwest Coast. (New York, 1857.)

11. FRIEND, HENRY. Flowers and Flower Lore. (London, 1883.)

12. SPENCE, LEWIS. Myths of the North American Indians. (London, 1914.)

13. DOUGHTY, CHARLES M. Wanderings in Arabia. (London, 1908.)

14. KEANE, JOHN F. T. Six Months in the Hejaz. (London, 1887.)

15. LAYARD, EDWARD L. The Birds of South Africa. (London, 1875–6.)

16. CANDLER, EDMUND. The Unveiling of Lhasa. (London, 1905.)

17. TYLOR, EDWARD B. Primitive Culture. (New York, 1920.)

18. KAY, CHARLES DE. Bird Gods of Ancient Europe. (New York, 1898.)

19. POWERS, STEPHEN. The Tribes of California. (Washington, 1877.)

20. MARTINENGO-CAESARESCO, COUNTESS E. L. The Place of Animals in Human
  Thought. (London, 1909.)

21. BARING-GOULD, SABINE. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. (London,
  1867.)

22. BROWN, ABBIE F. Book of Saints and Kindly Beasts. (Boston, 1900.)
  Consult also “Lives” of St. Francis of Assisi.

23. WARD, WILLIAM HAYES. Seal Wonders of Western Asia. (Carnegie
  Institution, No. 100.)

24. BAYLEY, HAROLD. The Lost Language of Symbolism. (London, 1913.)

25. DALTON, EDWARD T. Byzantine Art and Architecture.

26. Sacred Books of the East, Pahlavi Texts, Vol. XXIV, 112.

27. BRINTON, DANIEL G. Myths of the New World. (New York, 1868.) See also
  his American Hero Myths (1882).

28. OSWALD, FELIX. Zoological Sketches. (Philadelphia, 1883.)

29. ROTHERY, G. C. A B C of Heraldry. (Philadelphia, 1915.)

30. MALLET, PAUL H. Northern Antiquities. (London, 1890.)

31. GROSVENOR, EDWIN A. Constantinople. (Boston, 1895.)

32. GOLDSMITH, OLIVER. A History of the Earth and Animated Nature.
  (London, 1774.)

33. BROWNE, SIR THOMAS. Inquiry into Vulgar Errors. (London, 1846.)

34. BREWER, E. C. Handbooks, particularly “Phrase and Fable.”

35. WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSEL. The Malay Archipelago. (New York, 1869.)

36. LEE, HENRY. Sea Fables Explained. (London, 1884.)

37. COOK, ARTHUR B. Zeus. (Cambridge, Eng., 1914.)

38. HULME, F. EDWARD. Natural History Lore and Legend. (London, 1895.)

39. WALKER, MARGARET C. Bird Legends and Life. (New York, 1908.)

40. WALTON, ISAAK. The Compleat Angler. (London, 100th Edition, 1888.)

41. ARISTOTLE. History of Animals. (London, Bohn, 1862.)

42. HARTING, J. E. The Ornithology of Shakespeare. (London, 1871). Compare
  Thiselton-Dyer’s Folk Lore of Shakespeare.

43. HANAUER, J. E. Tales Told in Palestine. (Cincinnati, 1904.)

44. HUDSON, W. H. Birds of La Plata. (London, 1920.)

45. WHITE, GILBERT. Natural History of Selborne.

46. WILSON, ALEXANDER. North American Ornithology. (New York, 1853.)

47. SWANN, H. KIRKE. A Dictionary of English and Folk Names of British
  Birds. (London, 1913.) It contains a useful bibliography, and quotes
  largely from the Rev. C. Swainson’s Folk Lore and Provincial Names of
  British Birds (English Dialect Society, 1886.)

48. ST. JOHNSTON, LT.-COL. T. R. The Islanders of the Pacific. (London,
  1921.)

49. LYLY, JOHN. Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit. (London, 1868.)

50. COUES, ELLIOTT. Birds of the Northwest. (Washington, 1874.)

51. CRUDEN, ALEXANDER. A Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures.

52. LAUFER, BERTHOLD. Bird Divination among the Thibetans. (Leiden, 1914.)

53. MILLER, LEO. In the Wilds of South America. (New York, 1918.)

54. GUBERNATIS, ANGELO DE. Zoological Mythology. (New York, 1872.)

55. NEWTON, ALFRED. Dictionary of Birds. (London, 1896.)

56. CONWAY, MONCURE D. The Wandering Jew. (New York, 1881.) See also his
  Solomonic Literature (Chicago, 1899.)

57. WATTERS, JOHN J. The Birds of Ireland. (Dublin, 1853.)

58. SYKES, ELLA. Through Deserts and Oases of Central Asia. (London,
  1914.)

59. SALE, GEORGE. The Koran (Alcoran of Mohammed.) (London, 1825.)

60. WILDE, LADY JANE F. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions
  of Ireland. (London, 1902.)

61. SMITH, HORATIO. Festivals. (New York, 1836.)

62. WENTZ, W. Y. The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. (London, 1911.)

63. JENNER, MRS. HENRY. Christian Symbolism. (London, 1910.)

64. O’CONNOR, VINCENT C. Travels in the Pyrenees. (London, 1913.)

65. BASSETT, FLETCHER S. Legends and Superstitions of the Sea. (Chicago,
  1888.)

66. ELWORTHY, F. T. The Evil Eye. (London, 1895.)

67. GOSTLING, FRANCES M. P. Rambles about the Riviera. (New York, 1914.)
  See also her books about the French chateaux, and the Bretons.

68. BALL, MRS. KATHERINE M. Decorative Motives in Oriental Art. In _Japan_
  (magazine), New York, 1922.

69. DRYDEN, JOHN. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Transformation of Syrinx.”
  (Boston, 1854.)

70. BENDIRE, MAJOR CHARLES. Life Histories of North American Birds, Vol.
  I. (Washington, Smithsonian Institution, 1892.)

71. MACBAIN, ALEXANDER. Celtic Mythology and Religion. (Stirling, 1917.)

72. FRAZER, SIR J. G. Golden Bough (series). The Scapegoat (1913).

73. WATERTON, CHARLES. Essays (London, 1870). Also Wanderings in South
  America. (New York, 1910.)

74. SQUIRE. Mythology of the British Isles. (London, 1905.)

75. LANCIANI, RODOLPH A. Pagan and Christian Rome. (Boston, 1893.)

76. WILLIAMS, SAMUEL W. The Middle Kingdom. (New York, 1883.)

77. MOONEY, JAMES. Report U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, Vol. XIV, 1892–3.

78. BRODERIP, W. J. Zoological Recreations. (London, 1849.)

79. NUTTALL, THOMAS. Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and
  Canada. (Cambridge, 1832.)

80. HEATON, MRS. JOHN L. By-Paths in Sicily. (New York, 1920.)

81. IRBY, COL. HOWARD L. Ornithology of the Straits of Gibraltar. (London,
  1875.)

82. JONES, W. Credulities Past and Present. (London, 1877.)

83. SWANTON, JOHN R. Report U. S. Bureau Ethnology, Vol. XXVI, 1904–5, p.
  454.

84. HAZLITT, WILLIAM C. Dictionary of Faiths and Folklore. (London, 1895.)

85. STEVENSON, HAMILTON S. Animal Life in Africa. (London, 1912.)

86. MANAT, JAMES I. Ægean Days. (London, 1913.)

87. The Arabian Nights: Payne’s edition (London, 1901.)

88. COSTELLO, LOUIS S. The Rose Garden of Persia. (London, 1899),
  including “Flowers and Birds” by Azz’ Eddin Elmocadessi, “Jamshid’s
  Courtship” by Firdausi, and prose notes.

89. POLO, MARCO. Travels: Yule’s edition. (London, 1875.)

90. DAVIS, F. H. Myths and Legends of Japan. (N. Y., 1912.) Consult also
  Joly, Henri L. Legend in Japanese Art. (London, 1908.)

91. LELAND, CHARLES G. Kuloskap, the Master. (New York, 1902.)

92. THISELTON-DYER, THOMAS F. English Folklore. (London, 1878.) Consult
  also his Folk-lore of Plants, and his Folk Lore of Shakespeare.

93. FIRDAUSI. The Shah Nameh: Atkinson’s Translation. (London, 1886.)

94. PLUTARCH. Lives: Camillus, Romulus, Alexander, Etc.

95. Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archeology, Vol. viii, p. 80.

96. BOMBAUGH, C. C. Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature.
  (Baltimore, 1873.)

97. LELAND, CHARLES G. Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition.
  (London, 1892.)

98. FISKE, JOHN. Myths and Myth-Makers. (Boston, 1872.)

99. KEITH, GEORGE. Letters: in Les Bourgeis de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest.
  (Quebec, 1889.)

Footnote 100:

  NIBLACK, ALBERT P. Report U. S. National Museum, 1888.

Footnote 101:

  NELSON, EDWARD W. Birds of Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean.
  (Washington, 1883.)

Footnote 102:

  SCHOOLCRAFT, HENRY G. Algic Researches. (New York, 1839.)

Footnote 103:

  ADAMS, A. LEITH. Field and Forest Rambles. (London, 1873.)

Footnote 104:

  MOONEY, JAMES. Report U. S. Bureau Ethnology, Vol. XIX, 1897–8, p.
  401.

Footnote 105:

  GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD. Pawnee Hero-Stories and Folk-Tales. (New York,
  1889.)

Footnote 106:

  FORTIER, ALCE. Stories and Folk-Tales. (New York, 1889). Also,
  Louisiana Folk-Tales. (Boston, 1885.)

Footnote 107:

  JAMESON, MRS. ANNA B. History of our Lord as Exemplified in Works of
  Art. (London, 1872). See also her Legends of the Monastic Orders
  (1872), and her Sacred and Legendary Art (1911).

Footnote 108:

  VERRALL, MARGARET DE G. Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens.
  (London, 1890.)

Footnote 109:

  DIODORUS SICULUS. Historical Library.

Footnote 110:

  VILLARI, PASQUALE. The Barbarian Invasion of Italy. (New York, 1902.)

Footnote 111:

  FOX-DAVIES, ARTHUR C. Complete Guide to Heraldry. (London, 1909.)

Footnote 112:

  PERROT AND CHIPIEZ. History of Art in Antiquity: Vol. IV, Sardinia and
  Judea.

Footnote 113:

  Seal of the United States: How it was Developed and Adopted.
  (Washington, Department of State, 1892.)

                                 INDEX

 Abbey, founded by birds, 269

 Adjutant Stork, stone in head of, 96

 Aetites, or eagle-stone, 96

 Albatross, raft-nest of, 76

 Alectorius, a magic stone, 95

 Alectromancy, 217

 American eagle, 36

 Ani, or Black Witch, see _Jumbiebird_.

 Anka, mythical bird, 198

 Arabian mythical birds, 193, 196

 Ark, messengers from the, 99

 Arthur, King, becomes a raven, 163

 Arvenus, legend of Lake, 78

 Asbestos, a bird’s skin, 195

 Augury and Auspice defined, 214

 Babes in the Wood, story, 116

 Bennu, a sun-symbol, 195

 Bestiaries described, 58

 Bird-myths, origin of, 226, 253

 Bird-of-Paradise, legends of, 63

 Bird-superstitions rare in United States, 7

 Birds, alleged hibernation of, 89

 Birds as “Openers,” 249–253

 Birds as pilots, 161

 Birds as spirits, 10, 25, 189

 Birds associated with monks and hermits, 262–271

 Birds becoming gods, 18

 Birds changing into other birds, 92

 Birds connected with Lightning, 242–253

 Birds, fabulous, explained, 202, 208, 226

 Birds, lucky and unlucky, 25

 Birds of Assyrian seals, 202

 Birds of the Bosphorus, 16

 Birds riding on bigger birds, 81

 Birds transport souls, 190

 Birds, variety of accounted for, 226–241

 Bittern, breast-light of, 79

 Blackbird, red-winged, 239

 Blackbirds blackened by Raven, 229

 Blackbirds once white, 233

 Bluebird, mountain, 23, 240

 Blue jay, legend of, 240

 Bluejay visits the Devil, 166

 Brahminy duck, sacred in Thibet, 18

 Buffon denies song to American birds, 78

 Bulbul, Persian nightingale, 48

 Butcher-bird, alleged trick of, 79

 Buzzard, turkey, features of, 227, 236, 241, 284

 Chickens as weather-prophets, 221

 Chickens used in augury, 216, 223

 Chimney swift, Josselyn’s account of, 62

 Chouans, named from owl’s cry, 187

 Cinamros, Persian myth, 205

 Cock, alectorius of, 96

 Cock, as Gaulish emblem, 44

 Cock, barnyard, a sun-bird, 218

 Cock, Christian legends of, 109, 151

 Cock, stoned on Shrove Tuesday, 123

 Cormorants, legends of, 228, 231

 Cranes carry away girl, 237

 Crane’s foot, origin, 170

 Cranes transport small birds, 83

 Cranes war with Pygmies, 94

 Crocodile-bird, legend of, 60

 Crossbill, Christian legend of, 113

 Crow, Chinese three-legged, 172

 Crow, formerly white, 233

 Crow, hooded, dread of, 165

 Crow in Ghost Dance, 176

 Crow, omens from, 213

 Crows’-feet at eyes, 170

 Crows visit the Devil, 166

 Cuckoos as rain-prophets, 223

 Cupid of the Gaels, 3

 Curassow, legend of, 170

 David beguiled by a pigeon, 259

 Deluges, birds connected with, 98–108

 Demonic birds, 52, 205

 Devil’s birds, 166

 Direction, element in divination, 8, 175, 213

 Divination by birds, 212–217;
   trifled with, 257, 258

 Dove and the Holy Grail, 137

 Dove as bird of peace, 140

 Dove, Christian legends of, 113, 139

 Dove guides Cortez’s ship, 138

 Dove instructs Pope Gregory, 133

 Dove of St. Remi, 133, 137

 Dove, revered in Islam, 135

 Dove saves Genghis Khan, 141

 Dove sent from the Ark, 101

 Dove, symbol of Holy Ghost, 133, 134, 138

 Dove, symbol of Ishtar, 127–132

 Doves at Dodona, 130

 Doves in Jewish sacrifice, 140

 Doves in Solomonic legends, 259

 Doves, prophetic, 5–9

 Eagle, double-headed, 29, 33, 52

 Eagle, emblem of St. John, 149

 Eagle, golden, or war, 24, 35

 Eagle, imperial, 30

 Eagle-lecterns, origin of, 149

 Eagle, legends of, 97

 Eagle, Mexican harpy, 38

 Eagle, myths about, 68, 73, 76

 Eagle of Lagash, 28

 Eagles, omens from, 213

 Eagle-stone, or aetites, 96

 Easter eggs, customs explained, 124

 Eggs in mosques and churches, 54

 Eskimo bird-tales, 273, 274

 Fairies traced to Morrigu, 165

 Falcon, symbolism of, 150

 Feng-whang. See _Fung-whang_.

 Fish-hawk, legend of, 80

 France, popular emblem of, 41–46

 Franklin compares eagle and turkey, 37

 Fung-whang, Chinese myth, 207

 Garuda, Hindoo myth, 206

 Gaul, name explained, 41

 Genghis Khan saved by owl, 186

 Ghost Dance explained, 177

 Goatsuckers, cries of dreaded, 6, 15

 Goldfinch, Christian legend of, 113

 Goose and golden eggs, 66

 Goose-bone fable, 222

 Goose, golden Capitoline, 255

 Goose growing on trees, 64

 Goose in Buddhist myth, 67

 Grebe, legend of, 240

 Green fowl, Mohammedan, 15

 Grouse, marks on ruffed, 238

 Guan, legend of, 107

 Guatemala, emblem of, 39

 Guillemots, origin of, 237

 Gulls offend Giant, 234

 Hair, superstitions about, 9

 Halcyon days, meaning of, 22

 Harpies, Sirens, etc., 193

 Hibernation of birds, 89

 Ho-ho, Japanese myth, 208

 Hoopoe, legends of, 153, 250, 261

 Hornbill, superstitions about, 16

 Hummingbird, hibernation of, 90

 Hummingbird, riding a crane, 81

 Hummingbird, voice lost, 241

 Indian poetic story, 275–279

 Jackdaw of Rheims, 157

 Jay, Canada, gives warning, 4

 Jumbie-bird, Ani, or Black Witch, 189

 Kamar, Persian myth, 206

 Karshipta, Persian myth, 206

 King, choice of by birds, 82, 206

 Kingbird, riding a hawk, 81

 Kingfisher, halcyon myth, 20, 234–239

 Kingfisher, sent from the Ark, 102

 Kiskadee, legend of, 239

 Kite, Egyptian legend of, 151

 Lapwing and Covenanters, 256

 Lark, Laverock, funereal, 115

 Legend, definition of, 254

 Lightning attributed to birds, 243–253

 Loon, origin of its cry, 279

 Lucky birds, 25

 Macaw as fire-bird, 41

 Magpie, portents by, 171

 Mexico, national emblem, 38

 Migrating birds carried by others, 81–88

 Migration to the moon, 91

 Moccasin flower legend, 6

 Monks, medieval and birds, 262–271

 Morrigu and her crows, 165

 Nightingale, myths and legends, 48, 50

 Number, important in divination, 8, 171

 Nuns of Whitby, 88

 Odin’s ravens, 150

 Omens trifled with, 257, 258

 Ornithomancy, origin of, 5

 Osage Indians, bird ancestry, 11

 Osprey, legend of, 80

 Ostrich eggs, use of, 54

 Ostrich, errors pertaining to, 54

 Ostrich plumes, symbolism, 153

 Owein’s ravens, 162

 Owl, a Baker’s daughter, 121

 Owl a monarch’s daughter, 183

 Owl, Athenian, 180

 Owl in medieval medicine, 185

 Owl once a singer, 112

 Owl once an Eskimo girl, 233

 Owl saves heroes, 186, 258

 Owls, Christian legends of, 121

 Owls, superstitions about, 181, 187, 213, 258

 Oystercatcher, why blessed, 112

 Palm, associated with phenix, 198

 Paradise-birds, 63, 64

 Peacock feathers, indicate rank, 144

 Peacock, feathers, superstitions, 148

 Peacock, saves Chinese general, 187

 Peacocks, legends of, 141–147

 Pelican, errors pertaining to, 58

 Pelican, Seri ancestor, 11

 Pelican, symbolism of, 147

 Pharaoh’s chicken, 34

 Pheasant, Argus, painted, 233

 Phenix as a Christian symbol, 196

 Phenix described, 191

 Pigeons in church feasts, 125

 Pigeons of Venice, 125

 Pigeon shrine near Yarkand, 136

 Polynesian bird-gods, 19

 Quails, Israelitish legend, 93

 Quetzal-bird, 39

 Rabbit and Easter eggs, 124

 Rain-birds described, 223

 Rara avis (swan), 46

 Raven as culture-hero, 228–234

 Raven, characteristics of, 134

 Raven, Dickens’s “Grip,” 156

 Raven dresses the birds, 228

 Raven feeds Elijah, 158

 Raven feeds hermits, 164

 Raven flag of Danes, 159

 Raven, ghostly, 164

 Raven, Mosaic view of, 158

 Raven, myths concerning, 72, 105, 248

 Raven once white, 168, 232

 Raven, portents by, 169, 173, 213

 Raven saves body of St. Vincent, 164

 Raven sent from the Ark, 100

 Raven’s Hill and Barbarossa, 163

 Ravens, Odin’s messengers, 150

 Redbreast, Christian legends of, 114

 Redbreast covers corpses, 116

 Redpoll, bringing fire, 274

 Rhea, errors concerning, 55

 Robin, American, singing, 282

 Robin, European. See _Redbreast_.

 Roc (Rukh), Sinbad’s discovery, 200

 Sacred birds explained, 16, 24

 Sagehen, Paiute story of, 106

 Salamander as a bird, 196

 Scapegoats among birds, 25

 Scarlet bird of Taoists, 207

 Schamir, Solomonic legend, 249

 Seal of United States, 36

 Semiramis, story of, 128

 Sentinel-birds, stories of, 254, 256

 Seven Whistlers, 13, 89

 Shrike, errors regarding, 79

 Shrove Tuesday customs, 123

 Simurgh, Persian myth, 205

 Smell, sense in birds, 75

 Snow-owl blackens raven, 232

 Souls brought by birds, 12

 Souls carried away by birds, 13, 139, 148

 Sparrow in Christian legends, 112

 Speech by birds, 3, 10, 13

 Stones possessed by birds, 95

 Stork, as a migrant, 92

 Stork, legends of, 112, 153

 Stymphalia, birds of, 192, 194

 Swallow, Eskimo origin of, 238

 Swallow in Christian legends, 112

 Swallow, omens from, 25, 213, 218

 Swallow restores blindness, 96

 Swan, black (rara avis), 47

 Swan, death song, 76

 Swan, omens from, 213

 Symplegades, legend of, 131

 Thibetan divination, 174

 Thunder-birds described, 243–248, 281

 Thunder Cape, name explained, 245

 Trochilus legend, 60

 Trogon, or quetzal-bird, 39

 Trumpeter, legends of, 107, 239

 Tulare, legend of lake, 108

 Turkey, Franklin’s preference, 37

 Turkey, Indian legend of, 106

 Vulture, baldness explained, 227, 236, 241

 Vulture, omens from, 213

 Vulture revered in Egypt, 151

 Vultures, Persian, 207

 Vulture, Turkey. See _Buzzard_.

 Wagtail, Ainu legend of, 103

 War-eagle, American Indian, 35

 Weathercocks explained, 151

 Weather prognostics by birds, 217, 219, 282

 Whippoorwill as a prophet, 5, 6

 Winds as birds, 203, 206, 249

 Woodpecker, Californian, 281

 Woodpecker, magical powers of, 250

 Woodpecker, redheaded, 23, 106, 235, 241

 Wren, Cherokee story of, 282

 Wren, hunting of in Ireland, 118

 Yel, culture-hero, 230

                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

 1. P. 229, changed “l’epervier” to “l’épervier”.
 2. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
 3. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
      printed.
 4. Footnotes have been re-indexed using letters.
 5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.