Fantastic Birds and Where to Find Them
The real-life inspiration behind mythical birds!
Do you love reading fantasy novels like Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter and more? Do you get absolutely enthralled by the world of mythical beasts? Have you ever wanted your own pet Phoenix?!
I answered ‘yes’ to all the questions above!!
The world of fantasy is amazing, and the animals that live in these worlds, even more so!! Let’s read about a few mythical birds… and where we can find the real-life birds that inspired them, of course!
The Aztec Quetzalcoatl, inspired by the Resplendent Quetzal!
Meet the truly resplendent Quetzal, which inspired the Aztec feathered-serpent deity known as the Quetzalcoatl.
These birds are Resplendent, alright. Not only are the males a bright emerald-green with a ruby-red throat, they have amazing, long tail feathers that flutter behind them as they fly.
My guess is that these tail feathers were what inspired the Quetzalcoatl’s mix of bird and serpent! Similarly, the Quetzalcoatl is a snaking feathered-serpent most often depicted in iridescent green, with flashes of red. He was a creator god who brought wind and rains.
Most statues of the Quetzalcoatl picture it coiled over a mountain, including this one, here …. which has been criticised for looking like a pile of poop!
"Quetzalcoatl" by Robert Graham in San Jose's Plaza de Cesar Chavez. The Aztec god is often depicted as a coiled snake, but people of all ages complain the sculpture looks like something else, something scatological in nature.
So where can we find the Quetzal?
In term of their habitats, it almost seems as the Resplendent Quetzals live among the Gods. You can find this bird in the cloud forests from southern Mexico to Panama, anywhere between about 4 to 7,000 feet elevation. These areas are moist and, like the name cloud forest suggests, full of fluffy clouds.
The Phoenix, inspired by the Egyptian Bennu
The Phoenix is a bird that is beloved in many countries. I first learned about this fantastic bird in the world of Harry Potter - it was Dumbledore’s pet and patronus - so I always assumed it was British in origin.
However, the Phoenix as we know it seems to have come from ancient Greek folklore. It was a giant bird associated with the sun, and was said to have lived for 500 years before dying and being born again.
The phoenix is even Greece's national bird because it symbolises Greece's endurance through the millennia as a nation. The rising from the ashes instead of dying also is paralleled to Greece's capacity to be reborn as a modern nation after 400 years of Ottoman occupation.
In fact, Greece only won its independence from the Ottoman empire around 100 years ago, in the year 1821. (Apparently there was meant to be a huge celebration, but the country suffered from lockdowns due to Covid-19, and the 100-year-anniversary-nationwide-party never happened.)
But which bird inspired such a mythical creature?
Though it may be Greek in origin, many experts say that the ancient Greeks likely based the phoenix on a stork-like Egyptian bird called the Bennu.
This is a long-extinct sacred bird that represented the Egyptian sun god, Re. There’s parallels there, then, since the Phoenix is also a sacred bird of the sun!
In original Egyptian artwork, the Phoenix was depicted in Egyptian art as a heron. That’s before the great Greek storytellers took their liberties with the Bennu, I guess, and embellished it with brilliant orange feathers and gleaming yellow eyes and stuff like that.
Where can we find something similar?
So the Egyptian Bennu is long gone. In fact, it’s thought to have gone extinct around 1500 BC.
However, we do have a fantastic bird that looks like it could have inspired the lore of the Phoenix. But this bird is all the way on the other side of the world: it’s the Chinese Golden Pheasant!
Adult males bear a majestic crest of gold feathers. Their rumps are also golden, and their face and neck are covered by a fan of barred orange and black feathers, leaving only the yellow eyes and beak visible.
They also have shimmering sea-green feathers on their upper back, and they have cobalt blue flight feathers. The rest of their body is a crimson red, with a cascade of long tail feathers speckled with buff and black. So many colours - it’s like God decided to pick up painting for a weekend, and when he was making this bird, just went wild with all the colours in his arsenal!!
The Golden Pheasant’s magnificent tail actually accounts for two-thirds of the male’s length! However, possibly due to the length and weight of its tail, the Golden Pheasant is a clumsy flier, and prefers to stay on the ground and to run instead!
You can definitely see why: ignoring their long, heavy tails, these birds are also quite chubby and oval-shaped. They look pretty heavy, and it must be difficult to carry so much weight on their wings!
I wrote about the male’s magnificent colouring earlier. And although the female birds are a little more dull and boring in colour, there’s a super cool fun fact about them!
Okay, so: the females’ coloring is muted tones of brown. That’s pretty standard for most female birds!
However!!! A rare number of older females may grow male plumage and begin displaying male behaviors. This is probably due to the degeneration of their ovaries as they age! Their ovaries produce the estrogen that keeps the females in camouflaged colors - so once the ovaries (and estrogen) are gone, the female birds begin looking and behaving like a male! How interesting!
So where can you find the Golden Pheasant?
These gorgeous, gorgeous birds inhabit the mountainous forests of western China. But they can also be found in parts of western Europe, the Americas, the Falkland Islands, Australia, and New Zealand.
That’s all from me today. I hope you liked reading about these Fantastic Birds and where to find them!