Grove Koger
No, that’s not a typo.
Even if you’re a diligent birdwatcher, you can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of the bird of prey known as the roc—much less seen one.
Rocs are large, really large, although estimates of their size vary, well, enormously. The largest are said to be able to carry elephants long distances.
If you care to, you’ll find out a lot about rocs online, learning, for instance, that they live, or at least lived, in the Middle East and figure in such folkloric compilations as the “Arabian Nights,” more properly known as the One Thousand and One Nights. In one episode of that work, Sinbad hitched a ride on a roc. In a subsequent adventure, he and the crew of his ship came upon a roc’s egg on an island and foolishly broke it open.
In any case, rocs have inspired a number of fanciful works of art, two of which I’m including in today’s post. The one at the top is Sinbad and the Giant Roc, a color lithograph by an unknown illustrator of the English school. The second is an oil painting, The Roc’s Egg, by Elihu Vedder. If you look carefully near the upper left, you’ll see the parent rocs approaching the scene of the crime, while two crewmen on the right are frantically trying to warn the rest of their party. Vedder seems to have had a sly sense of humor, and I find myself grinning every time I happen across this painting.
But my main interest in the roc involves the real birds, or rather the fossils of real birds, that may have inspired the legends. A prime suspect is the Aepyornis, or “elephant bird,” several species of which once lived on the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. The largest of these, Aepyornis maximus, is thought have been the largest bird that has ever lived, reaching nearly 10 feet in height and weighing as much as 2,200 pounds. They were also flightless, which is probably a good thing. The photograph above, of an Aepyornis maximus skeleton and egg, is taken from “Paleontologie de Madagascar” in Annales de Palaeontologie 8 (1913) by L. Monnier.
In this connection, I have to mention a wonderful story by H.G. Wells, “Aepyornis Island,” which originally appeared in 1894 and was republished in the February 1905 issue of Pearson’s Magazine, with a cover by Wallace Blanchard. In the story, a hapless collector is marooned on an island in the Indian Ocean with a fertile egg of what has since been dubbed Aepyornis vastus. I wish I’d written it myself.
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