Adventures with a Texas Naturalist by Roy Bedichek

Author:Roy Bedichek [Bedichek, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 1947-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

14. Nature Lore in Folklore

Even the humblest naturalist soon finds himself becoming a folklorist of a sort, for he depends upon folks for much of his information. In the nature lore of the people he finds much truth that is stranger than fiction, and also much fiction in excellent disguise. The wheat he harvests from this field is cluttered up with much miscellaneous rubbish which somehow must be got rid of, and in the processing he passes not only on the reliability of witnesses but on the credibility of the story itself. Nor can he simply discard a liar out of hand as soon as he discovers one, for unreliable witnesses are often repositories of valuable information, as any lawyer knows. He finds himself studying beliefs in general, irrespective of their truth or falsity, because they furnish clues.

Thus when Thoreau, a specialist in beliefs, was told by the natives that Provincetown cows ate codfish, he was interested but skeptical. He could find no actual eyewitnesses to this contradiction of bossy’s herbivority. He didn’t himself notice any more interest on the part of Provincetown cows in fishy food than on the part of Concord kine with which he had long been associated on intimate terms as a yardman. While doubting the story, he set himself to find the reason for the belief, for it is almost an axiom of folklore that any widespread belief, though in itself absurd, still has some reason for existence.

He kept inquiring around until he found an “inhabitant” who assured him that sometimes the cows thereabouts did eat cod’s heads but not often. He might live there his whole life and not see one eat a piece of codfish. A less easily satisfied person might have taken this for an answer, but the conversation continued, and presently the inhabitant volunteered the information that sometimes a cow wanting salt would “lick out all the soft part of the cod on the flakes.”

With this cue Thoreau runs back over all the tales he can find handed down from Oelian, Pliny, Nearchus, as well as those from more modern chroniclers—Braybosa, Niebuhr, and others—concerning this perverted bovine appetite, suggesting by implication that the whole cow-eat-fish cycle might be nothing more than cow-licks-salt. For my own part I have seen many instances of cow-eat-gunny-sack, especially gunny-sacks which had contained salt. This kind of prodding-around the naturalist is bound to do all the time.

Alexander Wilson carried the brains and entrails of a Carolina parakeet in his pocket “until it became insufferable,” trying to find a cat to eat the mess in an effort to confirm or discredit the general belief that entrails and brains of the parakeet kill cats. But experimental material was scarce, and he had too much faith in the story to try out a dose on household pets in the homes which extended him hospitality. He thought it worth while to record that one witness declared that it was not the entrails themselves which were lethal, but the seeds of the cocklebur.

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