Cuckoo, Nightingale, Lark, Woodpecker and Other Musical Birds in Myth and Folklore
by Before the modern era, the sounds of nature were everywhere, day and night. Buildings, even medieval castles with walls thick enough to resist sieges, were not constructed to keep them out.
In Russia, by contrast, nightingales were often associated with witchcraft. There was a great demand for caged nightingales to sing in the homes of aristocrats and wealthy merchants. Peasants hired to capture the birds would have to wander about the woods at night following the birds’ sounds, and they often feared becoming victims of enchantment. In Russian folklore, Nightingale was a monstrous brigand who was half bird, nested in oak trees, laid in wait for travelers on the road to Kiev, and could whistle up a wind strong enough to kill human beings.
The lark begins to sing early in the morning before the sun has even risen, and so it has been associated with beginnings. In The Birds by the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, the lark boasts that it is older than not only the gods but also the very earth itself, an idea perhaps inspired by the lark’s ability to sing in flight. When the lark’s father died, there was no ground in which to bury him, so the lark had to bury its daddy in its head.
As is true with so many other things, people tend not to appreciate animals until they begin to disappear. As Europe industrialized and birds became less common, Romantic poets of the nineteenth century celebrated birdsongs with perhaps unprecedented intensity. The singing of birds represented a sort of poetic inspiration that was utterly natural and spontaneous. Among the most famous lyrics of the period were “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats and “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which the poets long to enter the world of joy that could inspire the songs of a bird. Hans Christian Andersen celebrated the beauty of nature over the creations of humankind in “The Emperor’s Nightingale,” a fairy tale about a mechanical bird that fails to sing as sweetly as a bird in the wild.
As the twentieth century progressed, writers increasingly thought references to nightingales or larks as an outmoded poetic contrivance. The woodpecker is not so much a singer as a musician, but its sound announces the start of the rainy season in many cultures. The sound of a woodpecker knocking its beak against a tree resembles martial drumming and resonates loudly through the forest. The woodpecker was sacred to Ares, the Greek god of war. Romulus and Remus, the legendary twins who founded Rome, were suckled by a wolf and fed by a woodpecker. Ovid in his Metamorphoses told of the witch Circe, who changed a young man named Picus, son of the Roman god Saturn, into a woodpecker after he had refused her advances. Jacob Grimm and other scholars derived Beowulf, the name of the Anglo-Saxon epic hero, from “bee-wolf,” meaning woodpecker, though that etymology is not generally accepted. Seen more as a fighter than a lover, the woodpecker has never been terribly popular, yet it may do better than songbirds in the raucous popular culture of the latter twentieth century. One of the most popular cartoon characters has been the violent and frequently amoral trickster Woody Woodpecker.
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