68 
The Queensland Naturalist August 1947 
The tale persisted until the early part of the 17th 
century when some Dutch explorers found the eggs and 
young of the barnacle goose — like those of any other goose 
— in the far north on the coast of Greenland. 
The solution of the mystery was published in 1895 by 
a distinguished French zoologist named Iloussay. The 
Mykenaean population of Cyprus and Crete in the period 
800-1000 B.C. were great makers of pottery, and painted 
earthenware vases and basins with a variety of decorative 
representation of fishes, butterflies, birds and trees. These 
artists loved to exercise a little fancy and ingenuity. They 
converted the sea-horse into a true horse, the sea-urchin 
into a hedgehog, and the sea-anemone into a flower. In 
much the same spirit they observed and drew the barnacle 
floating on timber thrown upon their shores after a storm. 
They detected the resemblance in the marking of the shells 
to the plumage of a goose, and brought the barnacle and 
goose together for purely artistic reasons, some of their 
fanciful drawings, half barnacle, half goose, easily giving 
rise to the myth. In the same way they fiddled about with 
the leaf design, curving it here and there until they 
evolved another goose. The barnacle goose myth was not 
known to Greece or Home as the Mykenaean settlers and 
their art migrated to the remote region of the Caucasus. 
Many of our clues to ancient bird lore come from the 
poets. What strange men are poets ! They never seek to 
verify, they never doubt, year in, year out they rhapsodise 
over the same birds, and glibly repeat the age-old fallacies. 
That there is more poetry in Nature herself than in our 
heritage of heraldry and mythology is quite ignored by 
the majority of poets — for what have poets to do with 
facts ! 
There is a line from Keats' Eve of 87. Mark, referring 
to “legless birds of paradise.” How easy to pass it by 
and put it down to poetic licence ? Yet years ago people 
did believe that birds of paradise had no legs, that they 
“floated aloof as though they Lived on air, ” and fed on 
morning, dew. As to generation. Nature is said to have 
made a hole in the back of the male where the female lays 
her eggs, hatches her young, and feeds them till they are 
able to fly — quite a contract for the young parents! And 
all because the savages of New Guinea, realising that the 
legs and feet detracted from the beauty of the bird’s skin, 
and its consequent marketable value, cut them off. The 
