Originally published in: Peterborough Bestiary
Now appears in: The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson
"Cranes divide the night into sentry-duties and they make up the sequence of the watches by order of rank, holding little stones in their claws to ward off sleep," the bestiary explained. "When there is danger they make a loud cry." Given the deferential poses of most of the birds in this picture, this nicely gilded illumination apparently shows an officer crane, small white stone in claw, inspecting the troops.
Scientist: Johanne Wonnecke von Caub
Originally published in: Hortus Sanitatis
Now appears in: Birds: The Art of Ornithology by Jonathan Elphick
Highly influential if not terribly accurate, Hortus Sanitatis ("Garden of Health") focused on the medicinal uses of plants, minerals and animals. This illustration dates from a reprint of an edition released in Germany in 1485.
Scientist/artist: Mathias de L'Obel
Originally published in: Plantarum, Seu Stirpium Icones
Now appears in: The Jewel House by Deborah Harkness and The Book of Fabulous Beasts by Joseph Nigg
By the 16th century, many scholars had turned their efforts toward understanding what really happens in the wild, but errors persisted about both animals and plants. One of the best examples of this was the fabled barnacle goose. While prestigious printers were publishing the Herball of botanist John Gerard, they fielded a complaint that he had appropriated the work of fellow plant lover Mathias de L'Obel — and done a sloppy job at that. L'Obel was briefly retained to tidy up Gerard's book, but didn't fix up the whole thing. Before Gerard published his version of the barnacle goose, L'Obel published his own. The creature was said to come from a tree in northern Scotland that sprouted barnacles instead of fruit. The long-lasting fable of the barnacle goose may have been inspired partly by convenience — or hunger. A Welsh ecclesiastic traveling through Ireland around the turn of the 13th century observed, "In some parts of Ireland, bishops and men of religion make no scruple of eating these birds on fasting days, as not being flesh, because they are not born of flesh."
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Scientists/artists: Conrad Gesner, Conrad Peutinger
Originally published in: Historia Animalium
Now appears in: The Great Naturalists edited by Robert Huxley
The antiquarian Peutinger gave the Swiss naturalist Gesner a picture of the fantastic bird of paradise, and Gesner dutifully reported that a specimen had been for sale in Nuremberg for 100 talers. A legend that persisted for many years about the bird — and enhanced its mythological status — was that it had no feet. The origin of the legend turned out to be prosaic. Descriptions of this bird were usually based on stuffed specimens whose feet had been removed.
Scientist: Ulisse Aldrovandi
Originally published in: Ornithologia
Now appears in: "'Roc': An Eastern Prodigy in a Dutch Engraving" by Rudolph Wittkower in Journal of the Warburg Institute (Also discussed in Fabulous Beasts by Joseph Nigg)
As Europeans traveled the world with increasing frequency, they encountered strange animals and stranger legends. Multiple travelers brought back to Europe from the East stories of the roc or rukh, a bird of astonishing size. Perhaps derived from the Persian term for a magical bird called the "simurgh," the roc appeared in works on geography as well as fairy tales, and it often appeared carrying an elephant. Ulisse Aldrovandi wasn't the only naturalist to pass along roc renditions. The bird also appeared in the work of the publisher Matthias Merian. In his 1875 book on giant bird legends, Sir Henry Yule suggested that the roc legend relayed by Marco Polo might have had origins in fossil remains, citing the similarity of big bird legends from New Zealand to Madagascar. Sir Richard Owen's description of the extinct moa from New Zealand might have helped Yule to this conclusion.
Now appears in: Dragons, Unicorns, and Sea Serpents by Charles Gould
In 1886, Charles Gould reproduced this picture of the Fung Hwang, or Chinese Phoenix. In fact, the male was called Fung, and the female called Hwang. Just as dragons could be auspicious, so could these birds, said to tower over most people and enjoy music.
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Scientist: Ambroise Paré
Originally published in: Des Monstres
Now appears in: On Monsters and Marvels by Ambroise Paré, translated by Janis Pallister
Though it probably looked monstrous to Renaissance Europeans, this depiction of an ostrich was pretty accurate. Paré described the ostrich in detail, and included a drawing of its skeleton. Paré borrowed a lot of his illustrations from the naturalist Conrad Gesner, and Gesner relied heavily on an old bestiary that was likely assembled in the fourth century. Calling the ostrich a "sparrow camel," the bestiary claimed that the giant bird would ditch its eggs in the sand, return some time later, and hatch the eggs by staring at them. This fit with the belief that eyes emitted a kind of ray or light beam.
Scientist: Athanasius Kircher
Originally published in: Arca Noë
Now appears in: Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World by Joscelyn Godwin
Like his predecessors, the German Jesuit polymath Kircher struggled to describe the ostrich. As naturalists had a century before, Kircher concluded that some of the creature's qualities — having feathers and laying eggs — placed it in the category of birds. But its massive body looked more like a camel's. An unfussy eater, the bird also had the singular capacity, he explained, to digest iron "either to strengthen its stomach or for some hidden ailment." While Kircher didn't accuse the ostrich of hiding its head in the sand, he did state that the animal plunges its head into dense shrubs "and fancies that if its head cannot be seen, neither can the rest of its body."
Scientist: Athanasius Kircher
Originally published in: Arca Noë
Now appears in: Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World by Joscelyn Godwin
Along with this picture of a vulture, Kircher relayed a story of one Father Joannes Baptista Cysatus, a mathematician of the Society of Jesus, who ascended a rocky mountain "never before penetrated by man." The remote mountain sported a crater with an oak tree growing in its center. The tree held a huge nest with three nestlings. Alas for the curious Jesuit, the parents were returning to the nest, and thanks only to his well-armed companions, the curious Jesuit escaped death. Unfortunately for the nestlings, their mother did not. Besides reporting the freshly killed mother's 12-foot wingspan, the brethren took stock of the detritus below the tree: skulls of rabbits, dogs, sheep and human children, as well as deboned goats and assorted fish parts.
Originally published in: Physiologus
Now appears in: Beasts: Factual and Fantastic by Elizabeth Morrison © J. Paul Getty Museum
In an obvious parallel to Christ, the mother pelican was said to peck her own side and use her own blood to revive her dead chicks. A 16th-century bestiary shows a devoted mother pelican doing just that.
Scientist: Hans Sloane
Originally published in: Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica
Now appears in: Birds: The Art of Ornithology by Jonathan Elphick
Sloane labeled the bird at the top of this arrangement a "Small Wood-owl" though it was likely a nightjar. He likened the bristly feathers around the bill to a "Cat's Mustachoes." The birds' feathers all look a little plump and stiff, and the birds all have oddly humanlike expressions, but this illustration isn't a bad effort for a young naturalist in a strange land. Sloane didn't get to spend as much time as he had hoped in Jamaica. He had been hired as the personal physician of the Second Duke of Albemarle, but the duke died an untimely death, and the young naturalist-physician had to return home.
Scientist: Johannes Faber
Originally published in: Thesaurus
Now appears in: The Eye of the Lynx by David Freedberg
This depiction of a toucan isn't a bad job, except that this bird's delicate body and slender neck hardly look robust enough to hold up that big, honking bill. Despite its size, however, the bill is actually pretty light, which would be necessary for the bird to fly. The same thesaurus that made a near miss in depicting the toucan took the intriguing step of showing the contents of eggs, both avian and reptilian.
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Scientist: Albertus Seba
Artist: J. Fortuÿn (coloration)
Originally published in: Thesaurus
Now appears in: Natural Curiosities from the Cabinet of Albertus Seba by Albertus Seba
This is part of a vignette of birds in Seba's four-volume work on plant and animal life. The big white crest on the left belongs, not surprisingly, to a cockatoo. The bird in the upper right that appears to smile is a tricolored blackbird. The parrot below it is a hawk-headed parrot. Both birds a generally accurate except for some slight mistakes in color. The technology for color printing was centuries off, so people fortunate enough to afford Seba's Thesaurus were hopefully also fortunate enough to afford a colorist to add the correct pigments, Regrettably, Seba's text didn't provide much guidance on color, so mistakes occasionally crept in. The hummingbird's color may be exactly right, depending on the species, although the shape of the wings is off. And one suspects that Seba never saw one of these iridescent jewels in flight; if he had, he might have depicted the wings as a blur.
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Scientist: Albertus Seba
Artist: J. Fortuÿn (coloration)
Originally published in: Thesaurus
Now appears in: A Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba
Seba describes this simply as a bird from America, and the creature is clearly quite proud of its tail. (If you had such a pretty tail, wouldn't you be equally proud?)
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Scientist: Edward Hitchcock
Originally published in: "Ornithichnology: Description of the Foot Marks of Birds (Ornithichnites) on New Red Sandstone in Massachusetts" in American Journal of Science and the Fine Arts
Now appears in: The Dinosaur Papers by Weishampel and White
After locals found "turkey" tracks in the Connecticut Valley, Hitchcock rushed to the scene to examine what they had found. He described the tracks of large and small "birds," some with thick toes and some with skinny toes. Hitchcock speculated that the littler tracks might have been made by juveniles. He stuck to his interpretation even as evidence mounted of strange prehistoric reptiles. In 1904, Richard Swann Lull of Yale University determined that these tracks belonged to dinosaurs.
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