Lifestyles

Of a Feather: The bird who would be king

By BILL CHAISSON
By Bill Chaisson

I was intrigued by the hoopoe painted on the tiny library in my neighborhood. A poet lives in the house behind the library, so I thought the hoopoe must have some symbolic significance. I was correct.

The scientific name of the hoopoe, Upopa epops, is thought to be onomatopoeic. It refers to the bird’s call, which is usually rendered as oop-oop-oop. Ornithologist Harrison Tordoff was a World War II flying ace and named his Mustang “Upopa epops” for its “silliness.” It does have a free associative jazz ring to it.

Tordoff was not the first human to use the hoopoe as a symbol. Its appearance and behavior have long caught the attention of civilizations throughout its extensive range. It is fairly large and boldly colored; is not at all shy or retiring; is not just migratory, but prone to showing up to breed well outside its normal range; and it is rather singular. No other bird looks like a hoopoe.

Although they do not occur in the New World (aside from some random visits to Alaska and the Yukon), we North Americans would consider them to be about the size and shape of jays with something of the brash jay personality as well.

U. epops range from 9 to 12 inches long (subspecies vary in size) with a long tail and rounded wings. They are stronger flyers than jays, moving along an undulating path as they half-close their wings after a beat.

Like some jays, they are crested, but oh what a crest. It lies flat above the neck until the bird lands, when it opens like a Chinese fan, arcing forward over the bird’s bill. The bill is quite unlike that of a jay; it is long, thin and slightly curved downward. The head, shoulders, chest and belly of the bird are an orangey-light brown, becoming more orange about the head. The wings, back and tail are boldly marked with thick horizontal stripes of black and white. The crest feathers combine all three colors: orange at the base, then white, and tipped with black.

Hoopoes prefer open country, where they can forage on the ground, but they also require vertical surfaces, either trees or cliffs, with hollows in them where they can nest. As it happens, these are pretty much their only requirements. Hence, they are found throughout Africa and Eurasia (aside from the major deserts and Siberia). Because they are not shy, the spread of agriculture was beneficial to them. Originally bound to natural grasslands, they spread into orchards, olive groves, and crop fields. Industrial agriculture drives them away because they eat insects, which are generally absent in the presence of pesticides.

For some reason, historically the European civilizations found the hoopoe reprehensible, while nearly all others treated it with great reverence. The appearance of a hoopoe in Egyptian art alongside a child meant it was destined to be a leader. The Persians thought of hoopoes as paragons of virtue. In the canonical collection of Persian poetry, “The Conference of the Birds,” the hoopoe is the king of birds. Its possession of a prominent crest meant that royalty had been conferred upon it.

The hoopoe is mentioned only once in the Bible, in the notoriously censorious Book of Leviticus, where it is described as unclean and Jews are forbidden to eat it. This is actually quite understandable. Hoopoes secrete an oil that smells like rotting meat and rub it all over themselves. This is especially the case for nesting females and the young, for whom it is thought to be protection against predators.

King Solomon appears in both the Bible and the Quran, but only in the latter is he associated with the hoopoe, which, after it takes the initiative of flying to Egypt on a reconnaissance mission, serves as a messenger between the king and the Queen of Sheba. Solomon initially surveys his minions and finds the hoopoe missing, which concerns him because of its purported dowsing ability. When the hoopoe does appear, it tells the king that the people of the land of Sheba have fallen into evil ways, worshipping the sun rather than Allah. Subsequently, with the hoopoe as emissary, all is put right.

The Greeks and other European cultures had the tendency to associate the hoopoe with the macabre, to say the least. According to Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Tereus, a real bastard of Thracian king, is turned into a hoopoe by the gods. Tereus is a rapist, a murderer, and a liar, but when his wife serves him a stew made from their son’s flesh (for understandable reasons), the gods take pity on him. This makes you wonder what the Greeks thought about the hoopoe’s character.

In pagan German tradition, hoopoes were thought to be useful in the summoning of demons. The Scandinavians considered them harbingers of war. By the Middle Ages, the bird was steeped in evil. Much of its ecology and behavior was interpreted in a distorted fashion. Its stink was thought to “signifi[y] wicked sinners, men who continually delight in the squalor of sin.”

One Greek assessment was not quite as bleak. The hoopoe molts for an unusually long period after breeding, and a 2nd century Alexandrian text called “The Physiologus” claimed the older birds lost the power of flight and were tended to by their young.

“The young hoopoes provide, therefore, an example to those evil men who, when their parents grow old, throw them out of their home; who refuse to support, when they are weak, the parents who raised them when they were still in their infancy. Let man, who is endowed with reason, learn his duty to his mother and father, from the way in which this creature, which lacks reason, provides (as we have already shown) for its parents’ needs when they are old.”

Well, amen.

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher from the age of 10. He is a former managing editor of the Eagle Times and now works and lives in the town of Wilmot.

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