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]

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

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.