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We have a fun mystery bird this week, the forest raven! Was it a real bird??? (hint: yes, but not a raven)\n\nThe "forest raven" illustration from Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner's Historiae Animalium, published in 1555:\n\n\n\nScans of the original pages about the forest raven. It's written in Latin:\n\n \n\nThe Northern bald ibis. Wacky hair!\n\n \n\nFlying bald ibises:\n\n\n\nFurther viewing:\n\nThis Weird Bird May Have Been the First Protected Species\n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nIt\u2019s high time we had a mystery animal episode, so this week we\u2019re going to learn about a mystery bird, one with a satisfying conclusion.\n\nThe story starts almost 470 years ago, when a scholar and physician named Conrad Gessner, who lived in Switzerland, published a book called Historia animalium. The book wasn\u2019t like the medieval bestiaries of previous centuries, in which fantastical and real animals were listed together and half the information consisted of local superstitions. Gessner was an early naturalist, a scientist long before the term was in general use. Historia animalium consisted of five volumes with a total of more than 4,500 pages, and in it Gessner attempted to describe every single animal in the world, drawing from classical sources such as Pliny the Elder and Aristotle as well as his own observations and study.\n\nThe book contained animals that had only recently been discovered by Europeans at the time, including animals from the Americas and the East Indies. It also included a few entries which no one today believes ever existed, like the fish-like sea monk and sea bishop. Those and similar monsters were probably added by Gessner\u2019s publishers against his will or maybe just without him knowing, since he was seriously ill by the time the volume on fish was published. For the most part, the book was as scholarly as was possible in the mid-16th century and was lavishly illustrated too.\n\nVolume three, about birds, was published in 1555, and it included an entry for a bird Gessner called the waldrapp, or forest raven. But the illustration didn\u2019t look anything like a raven. The bird has a relatively long neck, a crest of feathers on the back of its head, and a really long bill that ends in a little hook. Gessner wrote that the bird was found in Switzerland and was good to eat.\n\nIn fact, I spent an entire morning finding the original scanned pages of a copy of the forest raven entry, typing them as well as I could and modernizing the spelling where I knew how, and using Google translate from Latin to English. The results were\u2026not entirely coherent. Then, after I\u2019d done all that, I continued my research, and that included watching a short BBC film about the bird--which included part of the translation! So I transcribed it. Here\u2019s a translation cobbled together from the BBC\u2019s translation and other parts of the passage that me and Google translate could figure out:\n\n\u201cThe bird is generally called by our people the Waldrapp, or forest raven, because it lives in uninhabited woods where it nests in high cliffs or old ruined towers in castles. Men sometimes rob the nests by hanging from ropes. It acquires a bald head in its age. It is the size of a hen, quite black from a distance, but if you look at it close, especially in the sun, you will consider it mixed with green. The Swiss forest raven has the body of a crane, long legs, and a thick red bill, slightly curved and six inches long. Its legs and feet are longer than those of a chicken. Its tail is short, it has long feathers at the back of its head, and the bill is red. The bill is suited for poking in the ground to extract worms and beetles which hide themselves in such places. It flies very high and lays two or three eggs. The young ones are also praised as an article of food and are considered a great delicacy, for they have lovely flesh and soft bones. Those who rob the nests of young take care to leave one chick so ...