ITALY TRIP - Hoopoe

The natural world is the key to interpreting the metaphors and similes of the past.   

The images through which our ancestors understood the world were often from nature.

Around the Tuscan house we are renting, wildlife is plentiful. 

A highlight has been the hoopoe, a fabulous peach-coloured bird with full Pride crest.  From childhood they have fascinated me.  My bird book tantalised by saying they were a rare visitor to the UK. But I never saw one.

Then, on the first day of our Tuscan holiday, as Nigel, Pascoe and I entered the drive, there was one on the lawn.  It would hop to a new spot and use its long, curved beak to probe for insects.  Industriously and systematically, it did so over and again.

Good looking AND hard working.  What’s not to like?

However, the following story about a hoopoe is recorded by Ovid in Metamorphoses. King Tereus of Thrace rapes Philomela, the sister of his wife Procne.  He then cuts out her tongue so she cannot accuse him. But Procne finds out, and in revenge kills Itys (her son with Tereus), and serves him up to his father for dinner.  When Tereus recognises his son’s head on a platter, he attempts to kill Philomena and Procne.   

But the gods take pity and transform Philomela into a nightingale, Procne into a swallow and Tereus into a hoopoe – perhaps because the bird’s crest looks like a crown.

Although I am a Latin teacher, this is one time when I prefer the Persian story to the Roman.  In Persia, apparently, hoopoes were seen as a symbol of virtue and as a leader of the birds.

Now that’s the hoopoe I recognise.