Birds for Halloween

Crows, Ravens, Barn Owls and Vultures Fit the Part

Oct 20, 2008 Rosemary Drisdelle

Like other creatures, some birds have earned a place in Halloween tradition and decoration, including black crows and ravens, gruesome vultures, and scary barn owls.

Some creatures turn up year after year as Halloween decorations: bats, spiders, and black cats, not to mention skeletons, ghosts, vampires, and witches - anything that frightens people! What about birds? Some of these give people the creeps as well: ravens, crows, vultures and barn owls, and don’t forget the scarecrow.

Ravens and Crows, the Common Black Birds of Halloween

Crows are common birds around the world, while ravens are usually harder to spot. Find these birds any time where something has died, cleaning up the remains – this, combined with their black colour is what gives them a sinister reputation. On Halloween night, don’t be surprised to see decorative crow-like birds fraternizing with witches or hanging around those tilting tombstones people put on their lawns. Even though today’s Halloween fun is relatively recent, crows and ravens have been associated with witches and other frights for a very long time. Read more about spooky ravens and crows.

Barn Owls are the Scariest Owls for Halloween

We all know how the distant hoot of an owl in the dark can suddenly make the night seem spooky, but the cry of a Barn Owl is even spookier. Barn Howls make a frightful shrieking noise that cuts off suddenly as if someone has been murdered. To add to the owls’ potential to frighten, they hunt in the dark, and with their pale breasts and wings, look quite like a ghost floating in the air. Barn Owls have long been associated with ghosts and impending death in superstition. No wonder people think of them at Halloween. Read more about the scary lore of Barn Owls.

Ghoulish Vultures Enjoy Halloween Too

The vulture is the best known carrion eater – scavenger of dead bodies left lying in the open. Wherever there are vultures, they’ll find a corpse fast. This is gruesome enough to qualify them as a Halloween bird, but their appearance doesn’t help either: large, usually dark birds with no feathers on their cruel-looking wrinkled heads, they look like a hunched man in a dark cape with his collar turned up. Is that reminiscent of any famous Halloween characters? Read more about the bad reputation of vultures.

The Scarecrow Doesn’t Just Scare Crows on Halloween.

It’s true that scarecrows are meant to scare birds away from the garden before the feathered pests eat all the seed or destroy the crop, but because scarecrows are often created to look like a human standing in the garden, they have spook value for people too. A scarecrow can stand listless on a windless day, and then rattle to life unexpectedly when a gust of wind passes by. Don’t turn your back on the scarecrow – you won’t know what he’s doing. It’s a fair bet that scarecrows look forward to Halloween when they get to come out of the garden.

Spooky and macabre as they are, remember these Halloween birds are just birds on every other day: they don’t really do us any harm. The worst we should ever do to them is build a scarecrow!

Sources:

“All About Birds.” Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Birds in Legend Fable and Folklore. Ingersoll, Ernest. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.; 1923

Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds. Perrins, Christopher ed. Buffalo: Firefly Books, 2003

Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America. Floyd, Ted. New York: HarperCollins; 2008.

The Parlour Menagerie. Hogg, John. London: John Hogg & Co., 1878

The copyright of the article Birds for Halloween in Birds is owned by Rosemary Drisdelle. Permission to republish Birds for Halloween in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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Comments

Oct 21, 2008 5:57 AM

Guest :

Hi Rosemary - thank you for writing the article. It was very interesting and entertaining. I learned a lot about the scary birds of Halloween, and scarecrows!!! Janice :)

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