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The Flutter of Giant Wings
by Scott Corrales
FATE :: April 2007
Any reader familiar with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Rings trilogy and his earlier The Hobbit will remember the line “The eagles are coming!” and its importance to the narrative. Gwaihir, king of eagles, and his siblings, whose eyries were high up in the Misty Mountains of Middle Earth, provided the ultimate deus ex machina for Tolkien’s characters—hope when there was none, rescue from imminent peril, and icons for the forces of ultimate Good. Even more memorable perhaps is the Roc from the Second Voyage of Sinbad—colossal birds living in the spiraling heights of a valley whose floor is littered with diamonds and giant snakes, on which the Rocs feed. The Arabian mariner went on to have further experiences with these birds, coming across an island containing a Roc egg so large it looked like a domed building. Mayan mythology spoke of the Itzam Ye, a bird so impossibly huge it sat “at the very top of the world tree” surveying the goings-on below. In China we find the Peng bird, whose back is described as “similar to a mountain range.”
Such giant avians—at once wonderful, mythic, and terrifying—populate the literature of the imagination and are dear to the hearts of many around the world. But enormous winged creatures—perhaps not as large as the Roc, but certainly not as friendly as Gwaihir—seem to exist in our times, and encounters with them are usually unhappy.
On Good Friday, April 2004, between 9:00 and 9:15 in the evening, Juan Carlos Vazquez, a resident of Colonia Las Alamedas in Mexico’s Atizapan de Zaragoza, reported seeing “two birds of enormous size flying over my house, right below the level of the clouds.”
Vazquez estimated the wingspan of the flying beasts at some 80 meters, judging their size as roughly similar to that of a McDonnell-Douglas DC-9.
“One of them passed right over like an airplane, while the second one beat its wings. I was stunned by what I was seeing.”
Vazquez, who had worked for Aerocalifornia for 11 years, was very familiar with the aircraft he was using as a size comparison. “I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I shouted to my wife so that she would come over and see it, but by the time she arrived, [the birds] were gone.”
The Guatemalan town of Concepción Chiquirichapa has a tradition involving giant birds that stretches back to the initial settlement in pre-Hispanic times. Tradition holds that the first settlers occupied a fortified position on the height of Tuicacaix Hill, where they began to build their settlements and grow corn. Things went well until the hard-working agriculturalists discovered that the village’s children were disappearing at an alarming rate. They became aware of the giant birds known only as “Tiw,” who would swoop down to bear the youngsters off to their nests to be devoured....
Read the rest of this article in the April 2007 issue of FATE
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