Rukh

IntroductionI am staring at a bulging file on my screen, (a special feature that swells with the amount of contents). I have hundreds of files with different degrees of bulge. I see a picture, an article, an obscure reference...and bam it goes into a folder. I never evolved much beyond my stunted childhood learning process...identify, categorize, and store.

This plump storage container has a strange name...Rukh, an Arabic word for an enormous legendary bird of prey. Years ago I was intrigued with the legends of giant birds that lived in the mist of time on the high foggy cliffs of Arabia overlooking the Indian Ocean.

What is making me open the Rukh file now? Maybe it’s the large passing shadows on our property as a turkey vulture or a red tailed hawk swoops and sails on the rising air currents off the sea. Maybe it is a little town down the valley named Bodega, where the movie “Birds” was filmed.

Or, maybe it is just time that this bulging ‘egg shaped’ file is hatched.

Paleo note to PonderPaleontologists regard birds as the only sub-class of dinosaur to have survived the dino-mass extinction 66 million years ago.

This fact makes you wonder since bird-like dino’s did not go extinct...then maybe there are some very old specimens of the past still lingering around in remote parts of the world.

And this possibility my faithful readership is called the “hook” for a story.

Part 1 - Monstrous Mythology

as per wiki...“Myths may arise as either truthful depictions or overelaborated accounts of historical events”. Virtually every ancient culture has a legend of a giant flying bird, and each attaches its own meaning to it.

As I researched this legend, I found that there is significant proof of very large birds in pre-historic and our not-to-distant past. I have no doubt that story tellers had some basis for their inspiration. Your job is to allow your mind to ‘wonder & ponder’.

Is Sesame Street’s Big Bird just a story teller of children's positive fables, or does he represent our cultures incarnation of the Big Bird fantasy.

Arabian Nights

‘One Thousand and One Nights’ is one the oldest and most famous collection of stories and folktales. Over a thousand years old, these stories are the basic themes for a large number of translated stories in follow-on cultures around the world. First translated and published into English in 1700, one of the favorite stories is about the adventurous Sinbad the Sailor.

One of the first references to a giant bird is in the many voyages of Sinbad the Sailor throughout the Indian Ocean. Giant Rukhs would swoop down and carry off sailors for feeding their young high into the misty cliffs overlooking the seas. Sinbad’s realistic descriptions of this bird and its habits spooned a deep belief these ‘creatures of the cliffs’ really did exist.

Sinbad followed a Rukh back to its island nest and tried to take a chick back to Arabia. Mama Rukh came back from hunting early and Sinbad lost half his crew fleeing without a feather of proof.

I love the American Indian folklore of the Shaman transforming into the ‘bringer’ of lighting, thunder, and rain through the Thunderbird.

In this fantastical 1700‘s painting, “after the humans are gone”, it depicts the birds have taken over.

Humerus Similarities