In contrast with this sort of tale I find many non-mythical notions, historical or existing, concerning the actual kingfisher, which properly belong to my scheme. One of the oldest is the custom formerly in vogue in England, and more recently in France, of turning this bird into a weathercock. The body of a mummified kingfisher with extended wings would be suspended by a thread, nicely balanced, in order to show the direction of the wind, as in that posture it would always turn its beak, even when hung inside the house, toward the point of the compass whence the breeze blew. Kent, in King Lear, speaks of rogues who
Turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and vary of their masters.
And after Shakespeare Marlowe, in his Jew of Malta, says:
But how stands the wind?
Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill?
We are told that the fishermen of the British and French coasts hang these kingfisher weathervanes in the rigging of their boats; and it seems likely to me that it was among sailors that the custom began.
Although Sir Thomas Browne[[33]] attributed “an occult and secret property” to this bird as an indicator of wind-drift, it does not otherwise appear that it had any magical reputation: yet the skin of a kingfisher was sure to be found among the stuffed crocodiles, grinning skulls and similar decorations of the consulting-room of a medieval “doctor,” who himself rarely realized, perhaps, what a fakir he was. Moreover, we read “That its dried body kept in a house protected against lightning and kept moths out of garments.”
On the American continent, probably the nearest approach to the “sacredness” discussed in a former paragraph, is the sincere veneration of their animal-gods, including a few birds, by the Zuñis and some other Village Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, which has been studied minutely by our ethnologists. Yet we read of many other sacred birds among the redmen. The redheaded woodpecker is regarded as the tutelary deity of the Omahas, and as the patron-saint of children, because, they say, its own family is kept in so safe a place. Pawnees have much the same sentiment toward the wren, which they call “laughing-bird” because it seems always happy. The crow was the sacred bird of the “ghost-dance”—a religious ceremony of high significance among the tribes of the Plains, as is explained in Chapter IX. The Navahos regard the mountain bluebird as sacred on account of its azure plumage, which (as something blue) is representative of the South; and it is deemed the herald of the rising sun, which is their supreme image of God. One of their old men told Stewart Culin that “two blue birds stand at the door of the house in which [certain] gods dwell.”
In most cases among our Indians, as elsewhere, it is unlawful to kill or eat such a bird, which indicates a relation to totemism. Thus, as Powers[[19]] asserts, the Mono Indians of the Sierra Nevada, never kill their sacred black eagles, but pluck out the feathers of those that die and wear them on their heads. “When they succeed in capturing a young one, after a fortnight the village makes a great jubilation.” Some Eskimos will not eat gulls’ eggs, which make men old and decrepit.