August 1947 The Queensland Naturalist 
67 
the jaws closed. In a minute or two the crocodile’s mouth 
opened, the bird came out and went down to the water’s 
edge. 
The observers failed to see what the bird did at the 
margin of the river. Whether it vomited up any of the 
nutters it had taken or merely drank remains a mystery. 
In a few seconds it returned to the crocodile and the 
whole performance was gone through twice more. Mr. 
Cook shot one of the birds, which proved to be a spur- 
winged plover. And so, thousands of years afterwards, 
on the corroboration of a Mr. Cook, we accept Herodotus' 
story of the crocodile and the trochilus. A similar set of 
circumstances is reported from the fish world. In Bermuda, 
William Beebe noted that after getting its face rather 
messy from feeding on living coral, a Giant Parrot Pish 
upends itself in raid-water and allows small wrasses (other 
sorts of parrot fish) to clean its teeth and scales of 
adhering debris. 
What can be stranger than the history of the origin 
of the name of the Barnacle Goose? As late as 1661 Sir 
Robert Moray, the first president of the Royal Society, 
read a paper in which he described the bird-like creature 
which he had observed within the shell of the common 
shiii’s barnacle, and favoured the belief that a bird was 
really in this way produced by a metamorphosis of the 
barnacle. The legend seems to have originated in the 
East, where in the 11th century. Father Damien simply 
declares: “Birds can be produced by trees, as happens in 
the island of Tliilon in India.” 
The notion that the Brent Goose which occurs on the 
marshy coast of Britain in great numbers, was the bird 
produced by the barnacle, was favoured by the fact that 
the goose does not breed in Britain, yet suddenly appears 
in districts where barnacles attached to rotting timber are 
often drifted on to the shore. It was accordingly assumed 
by learned monks — who had already heard the ancient 
tale — that this was the actual bird, rnd it was called the 
“barnacle goose.” Owing to the fact that the clergy 
were claiming the goose to be a fish rather than a fowl 
and eating it on fast days of the Church, Pope Innocent 
III. considered it necessary in 1215 to prohibit the eating 
of barnacle geese during Lent, since he maintained that 
though they were not generated in the usual way. they 
yet .lived like ducks and must be regarded as such. 
