My apologies for posting a bit later than usual -- I was on the road most of the day for eclipse-viewing purposes, so it's already nighttime as I start this. (Update: and also Firefox crashed multiple time over the process of writing this post.) Anyway, we've got another vaguely-described bird, but one that I think has some interesting details.
If anyone isn't sure what this post is about, you can find an explanation at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting. If you want to see the entry from which the artists are working, here is the link:
As a reminder, all previous entries in this series can be found at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting .
The bird called Glugreng,
And in general you can see all of this stuff as it posts at the tag "maniculum bestiaryposting", assuming Tumblr's search function wants to show it to you.
Art below the cut:
@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) continues to post very impressively-rendered beasts. Here, since the only physical detail we have about this bird is "white", they've decided to take inspiration from the fact that it is kept by royal households. Medieval nobility did keep birds, usually for falconry, so here we have a raptorial design. And look, it's caught a fish! Good work, bird.
@pomrania (link to post here) observes that cataract-curing excrement is probably pretty valuable and worth collecting, so here we see a bowl with a dollar sign placed under the bird's perch. Honestly my favorite part of this is the very intense, extremely-close-up eye contact depicted in the middle there. Something about the bird needing (or just choosing) to get really up in one's personal space in order to do the curative "looking in the face" thing is charming to me.
@kaerran (link to post here) also went in the direction of "what kind of bird would be hanging around royal households" and landed on peafowl. There are a couple really clever design decisions here: it intentionally has very visible eyes so it's extra clear whether it's looking at you, and the "burning off the sickness" thing is represented as the feathers from its train being shed. (And thank you for including alt text.)
@sweetlyfez (link to post here) went in an interesting artistic direction, I think: since the entry was very clear that the Glugreng is "white all over", she rendered it entirely in thick white paint -- I think the texture is quite cool. Also I love the crown-collar-thing; SweetlyFez notes that she's only seen that in heraldry, and I think that is the only place it really appears. (I've seen at least one piece of marginalia that had an animal wearing a crown as a collar, but I'm like 80% sure that's someone's heraldic device being put in the illustrations for whatever reason.)
@cheapsweets (link to post here) jumpscared me a bit with this one. More very intense eye contact, but this time directed at the viewer. They also made the connection royalty -> falconry, and drew a bird of prey. For more details on their thought process, please see the linked post. I like the very intense eye contact conceptually, but also I keep scrolling down so it stops Looking At Me.
@coolest-capybara (link to post here) has again drawn something that makes me smile -- the art style is of course amazing, and the straight-on view of the pelican just looks so charmingly goofy. They note that pelicans have "so much convenient space to store all your pesky illnesses," and now all I can think of is a medical version of that "Put Baby In Pelican Mouth" post. (And thank you for including alt text.)
@strixcattus (link to post here) was inspired by the bestiary's decision to state that the bird is "white all over" and "has no black parts" in the same sentence. Weirdly specific, right? So they decided to explore in their post why this repetition might be necessary -- regular readers of these posts may recall that Strixcattus writes modern-naturalist-style reinterpretations of these animals. I'm not going to tell you what they came up with. Go read the linked post. Do it.
In fact, you should read all the linked posts, and consider following any or all of the wonderful artists who choose to participate in this weird little exercise.
All right, Aberdeen Bestiary time. A couple people said in their entry that they think they know what this one is, and I am excited to learn what their guesses were.
Now, since this artist tends to draw raptors in a very standardized way -- this just looks like their eagle but all white -- it's probably not possible to recognize the bird in question from this illustration. However, of course, there's a much larger problem in the way of recognizing this species:
This entry is the caladrius, which does not exist. It's another one of those mythical critters that didn't really catch on in the modern era -- or a strange misunderstanding of a real animal, like the salamander was, but honestly those aren't so much distinct categories as far as I'm concerned.
On the other hand, if you have similar Internet Experiences to me, you might have recognized it just now -- as soon as I saw the Aberdeen Bestiary illustration, I had a moment of "hang on, is that..."
The above is from the 2015 article "Two Medieval Monks Invent Bestiaries" on The Toast. You can check it out here:
A willing foe, and sea room.
(The author is now Daniel M. Lavery, but the byline on the linked article still says "Daniel Mallory Ortberg", probably because The Toast has been defunct for several years so nobody is updating these things.)
Anyway, the "bedbird" is indeed the caladrius. I was able to find the image from the Two Monks article by looking through the gallery attached to the "caladrius" entry on bestiary.ca (which has 94 examples, so it's clearly reasonably widespread). The bedbird comes from British Library MS Sloane 3544. And... I'm going to leave it up to y'all whether you think this should end with the "i've connected the two dots" gif or that quotation about the mystery no one thought was a mystery. It's late, goodnight.
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This week's Bestiary Posting talks about a white bird that takes on illnesses and flies into the sun to burn the illness away. That story sounds vaguely familiar, I feel like I've heard it, but I can't remember what bird it refers to, or even if it's a real bird.
So we know a few things about the Glugreng: it is a bird, it's all white with no black, it can fly, and it can cure disease. I don't know enough about the disease-curing capabilities of birds, so that last one isn't particularly helpful to me. What is helpful is another trait: 'it's found in royal residences'. So this ain't your run-of-the-mill kind of bird. Knowing it lives in royal households my mind immediately went to falconry, so I decided a raptor it must be.
Then that got me thinking on why a bird would be solid white. So I did a little bit of research. The birds I think of the most as being white include Arctic birds, and domesticated birds. Other birds that are mostly white are seabirds and egrets, so I looked up why those birds are white, and it's for camouflage to avoid being spotted by fish in the water.
So I decided to make a white raptor that eats fish. The osprey and white bellied sea eagle were my main inspirations. I made the beak a little bit longer to reflect the egret and other fish-eating birds like gulls a bit more. It also has some long chest feathers like egrets have. This one is also sporting some anklets and jesses, as when it's not being a doctor for the royal household, it is used to fish (I also don't know a lot about falconry so forgive me if it is wrong).
Bestiary entry of the week is the "glugreng" which is... a white bird. That's it, that's all the physical description we get.
I assume that means its something the monks would have been familiar with.
I've taken it as an opportunity to play with medium more than usual, rather than thinking too hard about the creature design - I've just done a fairly common bird in all-white, but I've tried to build up the paint so it's more the impasto that defines its shape rather than outlines.
Also it has on a crown bc it lives with royalty and also crown-as-collar is something I've seen in heraldic imagery and it looks cool. Perhaps I should've given it a little halo to indicate its magic healing powers but I only just thought of that so nvm
I'm pretty sure I know what this one actually is. As in, "I don't know how or when, but I feel like I may have read this bestiary entry somewhere" levels of knowing.
I've taken it in a different direction, though, focusing on the strange insistence that there's not a spot of black on the bird in question.
The Glugreng
The Glugreng (Glugreng glugreng) is a small, round, white bird native to East Asia, though it has since been introduced throughout Asia and Europe, primarily as a result of its use in the medical field.
Glugrengs have an acute sense of smell and sense for contagious illnesses. If they are introduced to a patient, they will be able to detect many dangerous illnesses without training, and will react instinctively by panicking and turning away from the patient. If the Glugreng instead is content to be placed on a patient's lap, it is a sign that the patient is unlikely to have a contagious disease.
Its detection is not foolproof, though the failings lie primarily in its lack of an instinctive response to milder illnesses and infections, and not in any inability to detect disease. Due to the ease and reliability of using a Glugreng to diagnose plague, many medical practitioners would keep one on them, and Glugrengs are still in some places used as a symbol of the medical field as a whole.
There is danger, however, in grabbing a random Glugreng-like bird off the street. The Iemray, (Iemray sophisma) also known as the "Fool's Glugreng," is a small, round, white bird native to East Asia, which has since been introduced throughout Asia and Europe, primarily as a result of it stowing away on vehicles travelling across the continent and stealing grain from those unwittingly transporting it. It, too, will either cuddle up to a patient or panic on sight, but its reactions are mainly random and indicate nothing about a patient's health. The only visible difference between a Glugreng and an Iemray is that the Iemray has a small patch of black feathers on its wing, most easily seen when the wing is outstretched.
Both Glugrengs and Iemrays eat both insects and grain, and they lay eggs in clutches of four to six. As their eggs are identical, it is unadvised to attempt to raise a Glugreng from a wild-caught egg, since many such efforts produce only Iemrays.
Glugrengs are still occasionally used in modern medicine, with most being bred for the purpose. Recently, efforts have been made to train Glugrengs to detect cancer, and the results so far appear promising.
shitty laptop camera of a pencil sketch in a very tiny sketchbook aside
I was trying to think of all-white birds and then remembered the Royal Residences part and went "hey, you know what? leucistic peacocks would follow both parameters" and cursed myself to have to draw eyespots by hand. Also went with exaggeratedly large eyes so you can really Tell when the glugreng is refusing to look you in the face.
Up above is a peacock shedding the illness, which I thought would be fantastic to show as the train itself being shed and burning up in the light of the sun (my artistic prowess does not quite extend to this, but also this sketchbook is like. 2x3 inches). In my minds eye, the eyespots are still visible, unlike real leucistic peafowl, but, like, in an iridescent way? Still all white, but opalescent shades in the eyespots. Technically the description doesn't say anything about non-black colours but this was funner.
also i misremembered and thought that the description highlighted looking the person in the eyes and more eye things so eyeSPOTS was even more fitting, but in the end the only comment about eyes was the poop curing cataracts. oops.
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POV: You are living in medieval Britain, a mysterious illness has befallen you, and your friends trot out the Royal Glugreng to find out whether you will live or die.
Another entry for the Maniculum Bestiaryposting Challenge. This week, we didn't get a lot of detail except that the bird, "as Physiologus tells us, is white all over; it has no black parts", lives in royal residences, and can cure all manner of illnesses by taking the illness upon itself, flying up and burning it off in the sun.
I have an idea which bird the entry could be talking about, so to avoid accidentally guessing it correctly, I chose the pelican, which was already part of the challenge (see Rubkawat). It is definitely a royal bird, what with the official St. James' Park pelicans and all, and it has so much convenient space to store all your pesky illnesses! While pelicans often have some black feathers, I will just assume Physiologus himself has never seen them.
My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge from @maniculum
Jinhao shark fountain pen with fine, hooded nib, with Monteverde Raven Noir ink, over initial pencil sketch.
Reasoning below the cut;
"The bird called Glugreng, as Physiologus tells us, is white all over; it has no black parts. Its excrement cures cataract in the eyes. It is to be found in royal residences. If anyone is sick, he will learn from the Glugreng if he is to live or die. If, therefore, a man’s illness is fatal, the Glugreng will turn its head away from the sick man as soon as it sees him, and everyone knows that the man is going to die. But if the man’s sickness is one from which he will recover, the bird looks him in the face and takes the entire illness upon itself; it flies up into the air, towards the sun, burns off the sickness and scatters it, and the sick man is cured."
The white birb that Looks At You (that's a good sign, right?)
We don't have a lot to go on here; it's white, for starters, and royalty like keeping it around. This made me think of falconry, with the (potentially fanciful) strict hierarchy of what rank of nobility can fly which birds. So, a falcon it is!
Bird of prey also makes sense when you consider how similar some of the description is to the actions of the Raggfong (albeit much more selfless that that noble bird...)
Incidentally, when doing the research for reference material for this one (particularly around falconry ranks), I now have a suspicion what this description might be of. At this point it was too late to do a reversal of my concept, and I could very well be barking up the wrong tree, but I'll be interested to find out...!
Because there's no pattern described, I didn't add one, to give it an all white appearance. That does leave it looking a bit sparse.
I had two concepts for this one when I started; the first was this one (Looking At You) which I figured was an interesting way to go, given the behaviour it exhibits, and the second was a picture of it in its natural environment (royal residence, probably with a token regent or two). Time pressure and what I thought would be most amusing resulted in the former.
This was an interesting challenge to see how well I could draw something symetrical. It's okay, I have other strengths, right? ;)
Also, please don't put bird droppings in your eyes... :(
As a reminder, all previous entries in this series can be found at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting .
The bird called Glugreng, as Physiologus tells us, is white all over; it has no black parts. Its excrement cures cataract in the eyes. It is to be found in royal residences. If anyone is sick, he will learn from the Glugreng if he is to live or die. If, therefore, a man's illness is fatal, the Glugreng will turn its head away from the sick man as soon as it sees him, and everyone knows that the man is going to die. But if the man's sickness is one from which he will recover, the bird looks him in the face and takes the entire illness upon itself; it flies up into the air, towards the sun, burns off the sickness and scatters it, and the sick man is cured.
Remember to tag posts with #Glugreng so folks can find them.
