The Mustangi Gurung of Nepal chop down the dead body for burial into many pieces and offer the vultures. Lama calls the vulture by praying and blowing his trumpet. There is a belief that a skilled lama can invite only the required number of vulture in accordance to the weight of a dead body to […]
Category: Accipitriformes
Bird stories, Griffion Vulture (Gyps fulvus)
The Palestines tell tat when the female vulture was ready to lay an egg, her mate would fly off to search for a hadjar al-nasr, a vulture’s stone. This precious rock was to be found only on a select few mountains, and the male vulture sometimes had to fly as far as the islands of […]
Bird stories, Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos)
Among the Dakotah Indians there is a deluge legend to the effect that when the flood came, all the Indians, hoping to escape, fled to a hilltop, but were finally overwhelmed, all but one woman, who was borne away by a great eagle, her father swooping down, and carried to a high mountain. She afterward […]
Bird stories, Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis)
A person went hunting and made a camp. While he was sitting by it a Horned Owl and a Hawk. came flying thither. The Hawk came on without stopping and settled between the man’s knees. The Horned Owl came and perched on the other side of the fire. He kept saying, “Throw that one over […]
Bird stories, Eurasian Buzzard (Buteo buteo)
After the creation of the world, the God ordered all birds to dig an individual well for each of them to wash there. Everyone obeyed, apart from the buzzard who was absent at the moment. When it finally arrived it decided to use trickery and get a well for free. The buzzard suggested the crow […]
Bird stories, Egyptian Vulture (Neophron percnopterus)
The nomadic Bedouin of the Sinai Peninsula believed that if the body of an Egyptian Vulture was buried for forty days, then dug up and boiled until all of the flesh had dissolved, a single bone would stick up among the others, signifying that it held great power. All that was required to win the […]
Bird stories, Cinereous Vulture (Aegypius monachus)
The Buryat people of Siberia say that the gods first brought the vulture to the world for a very specific purpose. After the deities had created the first people, they sent a vulture to protect them from any harm that might befall them at the hands of evil spirits. But the people didn’t know of […]
Bird stories, Himalayan Vulture (Gyps himalayensis)
An old and very odd legend of the Kirghiz tells of the treasures that awaited those who plundered a Himalayan Griffon nest. It was said that after an appropriate period of incubation, the Griffon’s egg hatches – and an axe emerges from the shell. Not just any axe; an axe that can cleave anything on […]
Bird stories, Cape Vulture (Gyps coprotheres)
To African people the vulture was the symbol of fertility. It was the grandmother who laid many eggs according to one story. Eggs out of which emerge not little vultures, but any kind of animal that there is on earth. Some tribes believe that the vulture was the original great earth mother. And our people […]
Bird stories, Black-breasted Snake-eagle (Circaetus pectoralis)
The Black-breasted Snake Eagle, like the secretary bird, is by the Zulus of South Africa considered a symbol of victory. A symbol of victory over a vicious and pitiless world. Again and again in caves and in other places of gathering, our people used to portray this bird. It is also a symbol of God’s […]