Watching Hoopoes

Grove Koger

Maggie and I have seen the strange birds known as hoopoes several times over the years, and we count ourselves lucky.

Our first sighting, which was brief, was from the terrace of our apartment on the Croatian island of Rab in 2013. We noticed, across the way, a fairly large bird sitting on the bare branch of a tree. As we watched, it raised a tall crest of orange and black feathers above its head, lowered them a bit, and flew off. We may have seen it for 30 or 45 seconds, but the sighting set off a frenzy of online searching on our part, and within a relatively short time, we identified the strange bird as a Eurasian hoopoe, Upupa epops. But knowing what it was didn’t erase the bird’s strangeness. We had never seen anything like it.

Our next sightings came in 2017 on the outskirts of the little Portuguese community of Santa Luzia in the Eastern Algarve. There were small flocks of the birds in the fields we walked by every day, but they were far enough away that we didn’t realize for a time what they were. I’d like to think that we’ve since become a little more observant.

John Gould, *Family of Hoopoes,* from H.C. Richter, *Birds of Great Britain,* 1862-1873

Our best sighting came in Barcelona in 2019, when we watched a hoopoe hunting in the grass for insects on the grounds beside our bench in Ciutadella Park. Its hopping, like its aspect in general, was somehow comic, but of course it was searching earnestly for lunch, and I don’t doubt that it found some. That’s it you see at the top of today’s post.

The hoopoe is the national bird of Israel, chosen in 2008 after a survey of that nation’s citizens. It appears, naturally enough, on Israeli stamps, as well as on those of several countries, since it enjoys a wide range. Thanks to that range and its striking behavior, it’s inspired quite a bit of folklore, and its earliest representations, according to the site Birds of the World, “date back to the Paleolithic Age,” when it appeared as the “bird-sun” in what are today Azerbaijan and southern Russia. In the Middle East, it was once regarded as “King Solomon’s messenger.” If you’re wondering about the hoopoe’s odd name, it’s an imitation of its cry, although the ones we’ve seen have been mute.

Birds of the World explains that hoopoes breed across much of continental Eurasia and Africa, although the birds retreat from the cooler regions during the winter. And speaking of cooler regions, here’s a puzzle. It seems that large, flightless or near-flightless hoopoes (Upupa antaios) once lived on the remote South Atlantic Island of Saint Helena. Alas, the species went extinct about 1640, presumably due to the island’s discovery in the preceding century and the ensuing introduction of rats and cats. But I wonder how those hoopoes got there in the first place, since Saint Helena is some 1,200 miles from the nearest landmass. Presumably a pregnant female found herself blown far, far off course long ago, after which the ability to fly became unimportant, but we’ll never know.

It’s believed that Saint Helena hoopoes fed on Saint Helena earwigs, among other prey. The insects are better referred to as Saint Helena giant earwigs, as males reached a maximum length of 3.3 inches—making them the largest of their genus in the world. Alas, the insects haven’t been spotted since 1967, and are now thought to be extinct.

Reconstruction by Apokryltaros of a Saint Helena hoopoe holding a Saint Helena giant earwig, reproduced courtesy of English Wikipedia

In the meantime, if you’d like to watch some of today’s hoopoes, YouTube provides opportunities here and here. For the best viewing experience, Maggie and I recommend that you open a bottle of Cava or Prosecco beforehand.

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Looking Back at the Future with Frank Paul

Grove Koger

I remember the future as being quite a bit more exciting than it’s actually turned out to be. And if you, too, were a fan of science fiction when you were young, you may have the same feeling. Better still, if you enjoyed the early years of science fiction, meaning pulp science fiction, you definitely know what I mean.

These comments are prompted by an illustration I ran across the other day by Frank R. Paul, one of the most prominent of pulp science fiction illustrators.

Paul was born in 1884 in Radkersburg in what’s today Austria but was, in those days, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Having emigrated to the United States in 1906, he was hired by publisher and writer Hugo Gernsback to illustrate a now-forgotten magazine, The Electrical Experimenter. The magazine carried not only scientific articles (including a few by Nikola Tesla!) but also some early science fiction stories, and it’s works of this sort, most of them written for other markets, that led to Paul’s best-known illustrations.

And those illustrations were gloriously colorful and imaginative. His cover for the August 1927 issue of Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, for instance, imagined a dramatic scene from H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. (Note that the issue also carried stories by now-forgotten science fiction writer A. Hyatt Verrill as well as by scientist Julian Huxley.)

Did I say dramatic? I mean over-the-top dramatic. The year 1927 was a bit before my time, but when I started reading science fiction as a boy, it was scenes such as this that fired my imagination. (And, perhaps not so coincidentally, War of the Worlds was one of the first science fiction novels I can remember reading, and it’s still one of the very best.)

Another exciting Paul cover is one he created for the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories (above). The illustration was for E.E. “Doc” Smith’s novel Skylark of Space, but that issue also contained Philip Francis Nowlan’s first “Buck Rogers” novella, Armageddon 2419 A.D. A couple of years ago, a copy of the issue sold for $105,000.

The image that prompted these thoughts (and that you see at the top of today’s post) was taken from the cover of the August 1929 issue of Air Wonder Stories, and illustrated “The Silent Destroyer” by one Henrik Dahl Juve. The magazine, another of Gernsback’s creations, merged in 1930 with yet another of his magazines, Science Wonder Stories, to become, almost inevitably, Wonder Stories Quarterly. Like many of Gernsback’s magazines, Wonder Stories Quarterly wasn’t successful, and Gernsback sold it to Ned Pines, who renamed it Thrilling Wonder Stories. And under that name, it ran for nearly another 20 years.

As I’ve said, most of Paul’s illustrations were over-the-top, and perhaps his masterpiece in that category appeared on the cover of the July 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, which may have been Gernsback’s most successful magazine, although he himself lost control of it in 1929. The illustration is for “The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika” by German-American writer Curt Siodmak. In case you’re wondering how good the story it might be, consider this short passage: “‘My African giant eggs have burst,’ lisped Meyer-Maier with a failing voice. ‘You must come at once!’” Thanks to Wikisource, you can read all of it here. But if I were you, I’d stick with the cover.

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At Sea with John Steinbeck

Grove Koger

As I expand and update my book When the Going Was Good, I’m sharing revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a travel narrative by American author John Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

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The Log from the Sea of Cortez: The Narrative Portion of the Book Sea of Cortez, by John Steinbeck and E.F. Ricketts, 1941, Here Reissued with a Profile “About Ed Ricketts” (New York: Viking, 1951)

The author of The Grapes of Wrath had studied marine biology one summer during college, but it was only in the late 1930s that he found an opportunity to put his interest to practical use, taking on part ownership of a biological laboratory with his friend, professional biologist Ed Ricketts. The two combed the California coast near San Francisco for specimens in 1939, and soon afterward made arrangements to collect along the shores of the Sea of Cortez, known more prosaically as the Gulf of California.

The pair hired the sardine boat Western Flyer out of Monterey, leaving California for the Gulf in March of 1940 and returning some six weeks later. Besides Steinbeck, his wife, Ricketts, and the boat’s owner, the boat carried an engineer and two seamen. In addition to collecting thousands of specimens at twenty-one sites, the group paid several visits to the interior of Baja, observing a seemingly free and easy way of life that Steinbeck found exceedingly attractive. A year after the trip, Steinbeck and Ricketts published a hefty volume pretty evenly divided between straightforward narrative and an enormous “annotated phyletic catalogue” of the marine invertebrates the expedition had collected.

As its title and subtitle indicate, The Log from the Sea of Cortez consists of the narrative, or ship’s “log,” from that book. Although the log was Steinbeck’s work, he had drawn heavily upon Ricketts’ journals in writing it; when it appeared separately in 1951, Steinbeck prefaced it with a loving appreciation of his friend, who had died in 1948. The Log is one of Steinbeck’s happiest creations, an account of what seems to have been an idyllic mixture of work, play, earnest talk, and happy drinking. The book also gave Steinbeck an opportunity to develop his holistic ideas about the organismic nature of life, his belief in the inter-relatedness of creation: “The brown Indians and the gardens of the sea, and the beer and the work, they were all one thing and we were that one thing too.”

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If you’re looking for a good edition of The Log, the 1995 Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction by Richard Astro. Other travel works by Steinbeck include Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research: With a Scientific Appendix Comprising Materials for a Source Book on the Marine Animals of the Panamic Faunal Province (1941; with Edward F. Ricketts); A Russian Journal (1948); Once There Was a War (1958); and Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962).

For further information on Steinbeck, I suggest: Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist (U Minnesota P, 1973); Richard Astro and Joel W. Hedgpeth, eds., Steinbeck and the Sea: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the Marine Science Center Auditorium, Newport, Oregon, May 4, 1974 (Oregon St U, Sea Grant College Program, 1975); Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr., eds., Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches (U Alabama P, 1997);Warren G. French, John Steinbeck’s Nonfiction Revisited (Twayne, 1996); Tetsumaro Hayashi, ed., Steinbeck’s Travel Literature: Essays in Criticism (Steinbeck Soc of America, English Dept., Ball State U, 1980); and Brian E. Railsback, Parallel Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck (U Idaho P, 1995).

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Climbing the Old Man

Photograph by Dave Wheeler, reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Grove Koger

The Old Man of Hoy, that is. I hadn’t known of its existence until I ran across an image the other day. The picture was arresting enough, but what I learned in reading about it was nearly unimaginable.

The Old Man of Hoy is what’s known as a “stack” or “sea stack,” a steep column of rock sometimes created when water and wind wear away the layers of rock in a headland. Such erosion isn’t uniform, varying of course with the weather and the tides and the type of rock formation(s) in the headland. The most famous sea stacks include Oregon’s Haystack Rock (which I’ve been fortunate enough to have seen) and Tasmania’s Totem Pole, but the Old Man certainly belongs near the top of the list, partly because a 1966 climb was filmed and televised shortly afterward, to great acclaim, by the BBC.

The Old Man stands on the coast of Hoy, the second largest of the islands in the Orkney Archipelago off the northernmost tip of Scotland. (The famed Scapa Flow naval base is on the southeast coast of the island.) The Old Man itself is estimated to be only a few hundred years old, having been created sometime after 1750, and is doomed to collapse in the relatively near future. It once had two “legs,” as can be seen in a painting dating from 1817, but one was washed away in a storm sometime shortly after that date.

It’s the BBC film that shows what I found “nearly unimaginable.” And what’s shown (accompanied by music by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius) are scenes from several of the climbs. In all, there were three 2-man teams involved—Joe Brown and Ian McNaught-Davis, Chris Bonington and Tom Patey, and Dougal Haston and Pete Crew. (The film’s official name, by the way, is He Who Dares: The Old Man and the Climbers, and it was originally broadcast on July 7, 1967.)

Those who reach the top of the Old Man (and there now are as many as 50 a year!) record their feat in a log book kept in a Tupperware container wedged into a cairn on the Old Man’s summit.

If you’re considering visiting Hoy, the site Orkney.com assures me that the views from the island’s coastline are “simply staggering,” but adds that visitors should “take care and never get too close to the cliff edge.” Consider yourself warned.

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