Louis Agassiz Fuertes' portrait of passenger pigeons and mourning doves.
The world of folklore is fascinating and provides an interesting lens through which to observe the events around us. Spouse Cindy Kerchmar, who has a graduate degree in the field and was a practitioner for a while, introduced me to the discipline and I now keep my eyes open for examples. I find it pretty exciting to discover them, especially if they involve birds and natural history. And with the internet full of folk and faux lore, I don’t even have to leave the house to pursue these gems (unlike rare birds which do require leaving the house- a good thing to keep in mind should one be an agoraphobe looking for a hobby).
Folk lore represents the informal knowledge of a culture- it is generally passed along through unwritten modes, such as music, story telling, drawing, and the like. And now in the digital age, the internet performs these tasks too, but because of its reach and the sheer quantity of words it carries, dissemination is both quicker and more pervasive. One modern subset of folklore is the urban legend, made famous by the works of the scholar Jan Harold Brunvand. These are common characteristics of the urban legend from the web site About.com:
- It’s a narrative.
- It’s alleged to be true.
- It’s just plausible (sometimes just barely plausible) enough to be believed.
- Its veracity is unproven.
- It’s of spontaneous (or indeterminate) origin.
- It varies in the telling.
- It’s likely to take the form of a cautionary tale.
- It circulates by being passed from individual to individual, either orally or in written form (e.g., via fax, photocopy or email).
- It’s attributed to putatively trustworthy secondhand sources (e.g., “a friend of a friend,” “my sister’s accountant,” etc.).
Just two weeks ago an acquaintance in my bird club sent this slide show entitled “The Rebirth of the Eagle.” It is a collection of slides and text featuring mostly bald eagles. It is hardly worth analyzing slide by slide because every statement about the birds is wrong and often silly. Even if you knew nothing about eagles, a little thought would make it clear that it is all nonsense. The assertion is made that at around the age of thirty “the eagle” becomes unable to hunt and fly: its talons become inflexible, its beak straightens and shrinks, and “its old-aged and heavy wings, due to their feathers, become stuck to its chest.” The bird at that point has a tough decision to make- either die or fly to its nest in the mountains to undergo “a painful process of change that lasts 150 days.” Opting for life means flying to its montane nest where it bangs its beak on the rocks until it can “pluck it out.” Then while a new beak begins to grow, it somehow manages to “pluck” out the talons. (When you consider all the feathers that have to go as well, the birds engage in a regular pluck fest.) And the point of all this is to demonstrate how we as humans must also adapt to changes if we are to survive.
I will pick just three items. First, all the photos are of adult bald eagles until we get to the one illustrating the claim that the eagle’s bill becomes straighter and shorter as it ages. That eagle is a golden, which of course lacks the massive bill of the bald. An eagle opting for change flies to its nest in the mountains. A map of the breeding range of the bald eagle demonstrates that much of it includes mountain free territory. (What is an ambitious bald eagle to do?) And finally, there remains the final combination of events: a bird “plucks” out its beak by smashing it on rocks, plucks out its claws, and then sits for five months without any sustenance. Given the innocuous and incontrovertible moral, I wonder why it was necessary to make this all up. I e-mailed the address given on the slide but it was returned. About.com says the slide presentation has been around since at least 2007.
Another bird related urban legend, and one that I like better, concerns, what else, passenger pigeons. I first came upon it in an article from the publication of the Pennsylvania rural electric cooperative. I love obscure sources and when I began reading the article I came across a story concerning a nesting of 250,000 passenger pigeons near Bowling Green, Ohio in 1896. Hunters killed all but 5,000 birds. Those that died were processed and packed in barrels for rail transport. Unfortunately, however, the train derailed and all 245,000 birds spoiled and had to be discarded. Never having encountered this tale before, I e-mailed the magazine asking for sources and soon heard back from the author. He sent me several web-site addresses where the anecdote is repeated. But no references appear anywhere! A book on endangered and extinct wildlife published in New Delhi also has the story but apparently the only library in North America that has this volume is McGill University in Montreal and it was not available through inter-library loan. But enough of the book is on line to see that it contains no notes or bibliography.
This is far more subtle because you do need to know something about passenger pigeons. First, the last wild bird is generally considered to have been collected in Ohio in 1900. There were likely a few birds thereafter but not many: there were certainly not 250,000 in 1896. Second, the number of dead birds is too precise (and too high a percentage of the total) to be plausible. Third, the event escaped the knowledge of every historian and ornithologist who has ever written about the species. Such an event would have made big news at the time. And finally, it is just too neat a story that all the dead birds were wasted. This story then becomes a classic type of folklore known as the “cautionary tale.” You should never have slaughtered the birds in the first place. The amazing thing to me, though, is that people are still making stuff up about a bird that has been extinct for nearly a century.
If any of you, dear readers, know of any other bird or natural history urban legends or other types of folk lore please share.
Tags: eagles, folklore, urban legends