Mysterious Big Birds

I have posted this essay on my Anomalies blog because, although there are a lot of reports of "thunderbirds", these specific accounts contain elements of weirdness which suggest there might be more than just a mystery animal species involved.

The Wild Man of the Pyrenees

     This is my 50th post, and it appears I shall have to go back to translating, because I have run out of English language material. It seems only yesterday, but in reality it was a quarter century ago that Michel Raynal sent me his paper, in French, about the alleged "wild man of the Pyrenees". In effect, it is a local form of a legend which extends throughout Europe, and which used to be portrayed in pageants, and on the façades of churches and other public buildings, not to mention coats of arms. In English the term was wose or woodwose. Classically, the wild man was conceived as solitary, hairy, speechless, and armed with a wooden club. Whether the idea related back to anything substantial is an open question. After all, the same people believed in the little people: fairies, elves, call them what you like. There is only a limited number of variations on the human form which the imagination can call upon to populate the local area. Very small humans is one variety, and another is the beast-man, who bridges the conceptional gap between humans and the natural world. Just the same, there is good evidence for similar such creatures in the Caucasus, so it cannot be ruled out that they once extended deep into the primeval heart of Europe, where they left residues on the collective memory.
     M. Raynal's paper was entitled, L'homme sauvage dans les Pyrénées et la survivance des néanderthaliens, and was published in an obscure journal, Bipedia, vol 3 (1989), pp 1-16. The original can be found here and, if you wish, you can use the "translate" facility to compare a human translation to a computer driven one.