Birds in Legend, Fable and Folklore

Among the many proverbial expressions relating to birds, none, perhaps, is more often on the tongue than that which implies that the ostrich has the habit of sticking its head i...

Certain kinds of birds have become symbols of popular ideas, or even significant badges of persons and events, and are thus more or less conventionalized accessories in art, by...

Angus Mac-ind-oc was the Cupid of the Gaels. He was a harper of the sweetest music, and was attended by birds, his own transformed kisses, which hovered, invisible, over young m...

No one bird known to Americans is so entangled with whatever witchcraft belongs to birds as is the raven, yet little of it is American besides Poe’s melodramatic mummery, whose...

Several nations and empires of both ancient and modern times have adopted birds as emblems of their sovereignty, or at least have placed prominently on their coats of arms and g...

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 fro...

The crowing of a cock ushered in the momentous tragedy that closed the earthly career of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus had told one of his disciples in the evening of the Passover, t...

I was sitting on a hillside in the Catskill Mountains a few years ago in June, when a hawk came sailing over the field below me. Instantly a kingbird sprang from the edge of the...

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...

Hulme informs us that Philippe de Thaum writes in his _Bestiary_ of the mystic bird: “Know this is its lot; it comes to death of its own will, and from death it comes to life: h...

The pagans of primitive times along the shores of the Mediterranean believed in personal gods and their guidance in human affairs. With the approval of these gods, or of that de...

Our first thought when we hear the word “deluge” is of Noah and his Ark, and the funny toy of our childhood rises to the mind’s eye. In that childhood we had no doubt that the f...

I fear no one would admit that a book of this character was anywhere near complete did it not include at least one chapter on the observances and superstitions connected with ow...

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 Mountai...

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 grea...

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 somet...

We are pretty sure to hear of the phenix every time a tailor or soap-maker announces that he will rebuild his shop after it has been burned; and its picture is a favorite with t...