Vultures and buzzards

Europe doesn't have all the kinds of vultures and condors found in the New World, no turkey vultures or black vultures, no California condors or Andean condors.  But medieval people certainly had birds, as I have discussed previously, and that included vultures and buzzards (buzzards and vultures are actually different  kinds of birds, but the names are often used interchangeably).

The European buzzard (pictured above), although now rare, may still be seen in the Pyrenees.  It, like the turkey vulture of the Americas, soars high on air currents looking for dead things to eat.  This is of course a useful function.  Dead animals lying around help nobody.  Different birds and animals have developed a readiness to eat dead things at different stages of decay.

For example, when scientists were trying to live-trap California condors for captive breeding, they would put out a dead goat, then hide in the bushes for four days.  First the ravens would come, then the turkey vultures, then the golden eagles, and finally the condors.  Time to spring the trap!

European buzzards are especially fond of the marrow inside bones.  This is hard to get out when you've only got claws and a beak to work with.  They will thus carry bones high in the air and drop them on a rocky surface, so that they split open, allowing access to the tasty marrow.

The vultures of the Mediterranean, also carrion eaters, were considered a suitable subject for theological speculation, as of course were all aspects of the physical world.  It was widely believed (falsely) that female vultures were able to produce eggs and raise chicks without the intervention of male vultures.  For some early Church Fathers, therefore, the Virgin Birth of Christ was preceded by the virgin birth of vultures, "proving" that such an event was entirely possible and need not be dismissed as imaginary.

Even more so, "Christ as vulture" was, for these theologians, an indication that God had planned out the natural world to give humans a foretaste and understanding of important religious issues.  Just as vultures took care of the dead, Christ came to raise the dead.  It all made sense.  God was thinking of us ahead of time, providing a handy metaphor in the animal kingdom to help us understand the heavenly Kingdom.

Noah Neiber of the University of Iowa is studying vultures as theological beings.

Okay, some early medieval theology is weird.  (Noah knows this.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on animals in medieval thought, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Exotic Birds

 The wealthy in the Middle Ages liked luxury goods—as of course do the wealthy in the modern world.  Something unusual, rare, exotic, and gorgeous, which also cost a whole lot, was both something to enjoy and something to show off to other people.

Rare and unusual animals were real luxury items, both because they were expensive and because the proper care and feeding were complicated and expensive.  Both Charlemagne at the beginning of the ninth century and the emperor Frederick II in the first half of the thirteenth century had elephants, given to them as gifts from distant rulers in the Middle East/North Africa--who of course would have had to obtain them from sub-Saharan Africa, making them even more of a novelty.

Frederick II also had a cockatoo.  Wait, you say, I thought cockatoos were native to Australia, and Australia was totally cut off from the rest of the world until centuries later.  So how did he get it?  Was it really a cockatoo?

Yes, it was really a cockatoo.  He wrote a book, which we still have, about birds.  Most of it was about training hawks (the art of falconry), but he also described other birds, and there are several very detailed descriptions and drawings of his cockatoo.

Although cockatoos are most commonly found in Australia, they are also found in Indonesia and parts of the Philippines.  So the emperor's bird almost certainly started life in southeast Asia.  Then, as now, wild-caught chicks were raised in captivity, so they would be used to humans (they do not breed well in captivity—trade in wild-caught chicks in some areas today threatens the wild population).

It would have then passed through many hands before ending up in the emperor's court in Sicily, being bought and sold for increasing sums of money as it traveled across the Indian Ocean or across central Asia, on the spice routes, and fetched up in the Middle East.  There it was acquired by the Egyptian ruler (referred to as the Sultan of Babylon in the Sicilian records), who made a gift of it to Frederick.  He was also the source of Frederick's elephant.  Being able to give someone a rare luxury item was even more of an opportunity to increase one's prestige than just owning it.

Although this is the only cockatoo we know about in the thirteenth century, medieval wealthy people sometimes had other exotic birds, especially parrots.  These were African parrots, and they too reached Europe via a long, complicated road.

Another cockatoo shows up in a Renaissance painting, done by the artist Mantegna and commissioned by the Gonzaga family that ruled Mantua in the fifteenth century.  The main picture shows the duke kneeling at the feet of the Madonna, and up at the top are all sorts of decorative motifs, including an extremely lifelike cockatoo.  Although there is no written record of either Mantegna or the Gonzaga family acquiring the bird, the inventory of the artist's possessions does include a large and extremely elaborate birdcage, which could have been the bird's home.  Was he given it in partial payment for the painting?

The cockatoos in medieval Europe are an indication that Europe was never completely cut off from the rest of the world.  Trade continued to tie different areas together, and both spices and exotic birds were considered worth the expense.

An article in the New Yorker by Rebecca Mead, July 5 2021, discusses the original identification of the cockatoo in Mantegna's painting.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on the medieval economy and luxury goods, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Birds in the Middle Ages

We take birds for granted.  Some are domestic and get eaten (or their eggs are eaten).  Some are wild and are hunted for food.  Some are wild, and we give them something to eat in bird feeders.  We admire their flight and enjoy their songs.  It's not often that we treat them as partners.

Medieval Europe had the same birds as modern Europe (though not in the same proportions), but they had more hunting hawks, trained to be partners in hunts, just as a modern pointer or retriever (dog) can be a partner to their master in the hunt.  (Or not.  The Labrador retrievers I've known would either not figure out where the duck went or would carry it off for their own purposes.  Training is everything.)

Most farmyards had chickens, free range, that lived on spilled grain and insects.  Keeping down the insects was an important function, nearly as important as laying eggs  Eggs were an important source of protein in the medieval diet, and when a hen got too old to lay, she became dinner herself.  Geese and to a lesser extent ducks provided eggs and feathers (and dinner).  Geese also made excellent watchmen, raising a great honking if something untoward happened at night.

Medieval people also ate songbirds, ones we would consider too small to bother with (and you would not have caught a medieval peasant putting out their precious grain for the birds to eat).  The easiest way to catch them was to spread lime on a branch, so that when the bird landed on it, their feet would become stuck.  They did however appreciate songbirds for their songs as well as their bits of meat.  The nightingale especially appears in many a song and story, enchanting the lovers.  (The US doesn't have nightingales.  Our loss.  Nighthawks are not the same.)

Aristocrats, but not peasants, used hawks in hunting.  Training a hawk was a long and complicated process.  The thirteenth-century emperor Frederick II wrote a book on falconry that is still respected today (an image from it appears below).  The chief goal is to make the bird, from a very young age, think of the human as the source of food.  Every respectable castle or manor had a mews, where the hawks were trained and housed.  One could find baby birds and raise them oneself or buy them.  Trained falcons made good gifts.

In the mews, the hawk would be tied to its perch, usually hooded to keep it calm and in the dark.  Merchants might sew a hawk's eyes shut while transporting them.  Hawks have much better eyesight than humans and can adjust for closer or longer distance in a way that is the envy of everyone wearing bifocals.  But if they can't see, they tend to sit quietly, even if not happy about it.

Hawks had leather straps, called jesses, attached to their legs, which could be held (or grabbed).  Generally the jesses had a bell, to help one locate a hawk that had not come back when it was supposed to.  The way it was supposed to work was to ride out hunting with a hooded hawk sitting on one's wrist (the hand and wrist in a heavy leather glove because the talons are sharp).  Then one unhooded the hawk and freed the jesses to send it up after a bird one was trying to catch.  Theoretically the hawk caught the bird and brought it back, getting a treat as a reward.  There are enough descriptions of chasing the hawk by the sound of the bell, of whirling the lure that was supposed to attract it, and giving calls to which it had been trained, to indicate that coming back didn't always work out right.  This was part of the fun of the chase.

Birds caught with hawks became dinner.  Wild ducks were normally caught with hawks, not with archery (and of course double-barrel shotguns were centuries in the future).  Different hawks were used for different prey.  Sparrowhawks (kestrels) caught small birds, as the name implies, big goshawks could take a goose, and there were others in between.  Different kinds of hawks were considered more or less noble and thus more or less suitable for those different social station.  A good master of hawks was highly prized.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017 

For more on animals in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.