Birds Like Eagles

For the last month I have been driving the back roads of Wilmot and flushing flocks of goldfinches and sparrows from the dirt and gravel. There are 50 miles of road in this little town and half of them are unpaved. Many of these flocks seem concentrated near the open fields and pastures, which are not common around here. An estimated 83% of the town is forested land, according to our inventory of natural resources.

This time of year, it is dark when I take the dog for a walk in the morning, and I see Orion, that harbinger of winter, in the western sky. But I don’t see any birds. Even the owls are silent this time of year. If the dog is especially rambunctious, she may disturb some sleeping white-throated sparrows, causing them to emit their somewhat querulous calls. They apparently don’t like to be awakened before dawn.

I am thinking of filling up my feeders with seed, just so I can see more and different birds. This breaks my rule of waiting until the ground freezes. It was my mother’s rule when I was a kid, and she broke it this year because she was bored and needed “something to watch.”

More than anything else, I worry about bears mauling my feeding station. We have a lot of bears in this region, and they are certainly active now. Hunting season continues until November 30 in the two wildlife management units that include Wilmot (G1 and I1). From the safety of our cabin, the dog barks at bears passing through but is wise enough not to take one on when she is outside.

Perhaps it is this general dearth of real birds that is making me think of legendary ones. I have noticed the phoenix cropping up in various media lately and, when I recently read David Quammen’s Song of the Dodo, I learned that Madagascar’s elephant birds helped spread the myth of the roc.

Most people were reintroduced to the phoenix by the Harry Potter books, as it is the companion of Albus Dumbledore, more or less his familiar, as a witch might keep a black cat. The bird departs when Dumbledore is killed. As with much of J.K. Rowling’s myth making, her phoenix is a patchwork of various legends held together by her own imagination.

In A Dictionary of Symbols by J.E. Cirlot, a book I have carried around with me for decades now, the phoenix is described as “about the size of an eagle, graced with certain features of the pheasant.” Most depictions give it the fierce bill of an eagle but the gaudy coloration of a golden pheasant.

According to Cirlot, “When it saw death draw near, it would make a nest of sweet-smelling wood and resins, which it would expose to the full force of the sun’s rays, until it burnt itself to ashes in the flames. Another phoenix would then arise from the marrow of its bones.” Although the myth is very old, with its deepest roots in either Egypt or Greece, it has persisted in Western culture because of the obvious resemblance of its “life cycle” to the death and resurrection of Christ. This is a curious transference because while many non-Christian religions posit a natural world that consists of endless cycles of “periodic destruction and recreation” (as Cirlot has it), the Abrahamic religions see history as having a beginning and an end. The phoenix dies and is reborn over and over, but in the Christian mythos Jesus does this only once.

I have Cirlot’s book, which was published in Spanish in 1958 and translated into English in 1962, because my college girlfriend swore by it as a reference for the interpretation of dreams. (Her mother taught the occult at UC Davis.) The dictionary draws a psychological interpretation from Oswald Wirth, a Swiss occultist and tarot specialist—there is a phoenix card in the traditional deck. The bird is that “which we all keep within ourselves, enabling us to live out every moment and to overcome each and every partial death which we call a ‘dream’ or ‘change’.”

The roc is not in Cirlot’s book. Its origins are in Arabic and Persian folklore, but its roots may be in India and its legend certainly spread to China. Like the phoenix, it is said to resemble an eagle, but rather than being colorful and regenerative, its claim to fame is being extremely large. We have Marco Polo (1254-1324) to thank for its association with Madagascar. In his account, the roc “was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size; so big in fact that its quills were twelve paces long and thick in proportion. And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air …”

An authoritative text of Polo’s adventures, The Book of Marvels, which were dictated to Rustichello da Pisa while they were prisoners of war in Genoa, does not exist. Polo said that the Great Khan sent emissaries to Madagascar and they returned with a feather the size of a palm frond. Modern publications are varying blends of late medieval and early Modern translations. Scholar Ronald Latham believes Rustichello added the fantastical elements to make it more appealing to a wider audience.

Rational explanations of the roc’s enormity suggest that European discoveries of fossilized elephant bird eggs on early visits to Madagascar seemed to verify the legend of a gigantic bird. However, the flightless Aepyornis resembled a moa or ostrich, not an eagle, and was extinct by 1000 CE.

A piece of wood in the temple of Jerusalem was said to have been brought by the roc. It was decorated with the silver rings, which were eventually paid to Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus. The piece of wood was used to make Christ’s cross. All pagan myths, it seems, lead to Jesus.

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. He lives and works in Wilmot. A collection of these essays is available at amazon.com.