Hello Dear Readers!
We all know that Twitter can be somewhat of a cesspool of ‘splainers, sealions, and a haven for creeps in your DMs.
Twitter has also been a great place to connect with (good) people and share (good) information! I re-shared my previous post about Stolas and the Giant Cuban Owl Ornimegalonyx for International Owl Awareness Day. I was officially today years old when I learned about a legend of a giant owl and a giant extinct flightless owl.
Chickcharney?
— Jim Lee (@OceanReturner) August 4, 2019
Since I’m a big fan of big owls (and a big fan of small owls…and a fan of all owls, really) we’re going to run with the “giant flightless owl fossil and mythology” theme and talk about Chickcharney and the extinct flightless owl Tyto pollens, also known as the Andros Island barn owl, Bahamian barn owl, or Chickcharney.
Chickcharney, The Legend
Chickcharney (or Chickcharnee/Chickcharnie) calls the pine and hardwood forests of Andros Island, the largest island in the archipelago of the Bahamain Islands. Descriptions of Chickcharnies (there are more than one) tell of feathered bipedal creatures with a prehensile tail, three toes of each foot, and three visible fingers on each hand. Their red eyes are set in heads that can turn completely around. Around one meter tall, Chichcharnies are tree-nesters: if you see a tall pine tree with a fork at the top, that’s where the Chickcharnies will raise their young.
If you should happen to visit Andros Island and enjoy a hike in the forests, you would be best to carry a bright piece of cloth or flowers with you: this is said to charm the Chickcharnies. It is also best that one keeps a civil tongue in their head when they encounter a Chickcharney: they are neither “evil” (like the demon Stolas) or “good.” Chickcharnies are known mischief-makers. If you’re respectful to the Chickcharnies, you will have blessings and good fortune. Disrespect Chickcharnies at your peril, however: a lifetime of misery may follow. That may have been good advice for one former British Prime Minister to have followed, according to Chickcharney lore.
Chickcharney and Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister from May 1937 – May 1940, during the first eight months of the Second World War. Chamberlain is more well-known for the Munich Agreement of 1938 (the agreement that ceded western Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany to appease Adolf Hitler) than he is for his involvement with Chickcharnies, but he does make an appearance in Chickcharney lore.
When Chamberlain was around 20 years old, his father apprenticed him to an accounting firm where he later became a full employee. Joseph Chamberlain saw his family’s fortune declining, so in 1890 he put Neville in charge of establishing and managing a sisal plantation on Andros Island. Sisal, or Agave sisalana, is a species of agave that is originally from southern Mexico but has been cultivated in many places around the world for its stiff hemp-like fibers.
In 1891 Chamberlain took out a lease on a 110 km square parcel of land on Andros Island for the venture. This was possible, of course, because Great Britain began colonizing Andros Island in 1783, complete with all that entails (a.k.a. slavery.) Great Britain wasn’t the first nation to colonize and exploit Andros Island. Prior to the arrival of Spanish colonists after the initial invasion of the island between 1499 – 1500, the Lukku-Cairi people lived on Andros. Thanks to the exploitation of the Lukku-Cairi people, by 1520 the population was considered extinct.
Chamberlain spent six years trying to make the plantation work. His efforts failed. The official story is that Agave sisalana did not grow well on Andros Island. That’s too bad for Chamberlain, because the failed plantation cost the family business a whopping £50,000 (or £4.2 million in today’s dollars). [Cue sad slide-whistle noise.]
What does this have to do with Chickcharney, you ask? Well, legend has it that during his ill-fated stay on Andros Island, Chamberlain openly scoffed at the stories of the Chickcharney (as European colonizers are wont to do at the legends and lore of the areas they colonize.) The Chickcharnies apparently did not take kindly to be openly laughed at. Despite the official story of sisal’s incompatibility with the area, the failure of the sisal plantation is credited to the intervention of the offended Chickcharnies. A nod is also given to the Chickcharnies for another event that will be forever linked to Chamberlain’s legacy: the Munich Agreement ultimately failed as it did not halt the invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany as was hoped.
Don’t laugh at owls, my friends. Or legends/folklore of critters that resemble owls. It just isn’t worth the risk.
Tyto pollens, the Bahamian Owl
As we saw in the last OWLS! post about the Cuban Giant Owl Ornimegalonyx (Late Pleistocene: 126,000 – 11,700 years ago) and Stolas, the demon character from Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, are likely a case of wonderful coincidence rather than the knowledge of the fossil influencing the art/mythology. However, that may not be the case for Chickcharney and its Quaternary doppelganger, Tyto pollens.
Tyto pollens, also known as the Andros Island Barn Owl, Bahamian Barn Owl, Bahamian Great Owl, and – not surprisingly – Chickcharney, is a recently extinct owl that is in the same genus as the Barn Owl. The Andros Island Barn Owl is estimated to have stood at one meter (three feet) tall, and was considered by Wetmore (1937) as much more robust and stronger than the Barn Owl. Tyto pollens, like all owls, was a predator. What does a 1 meter tall owl eat? Wetmore (1937) thought that Tyto pollens likely preyed on the large rodent Geocapromys.
Tyto pollens is younger than the Cuban Giant Owl Ornimegalonyx in that it was present in the old growth pine forests of the Quaternary. This means that Tyto pollens was most likely seen by the original population of Andros Island: the Lukku-Cairi people most certainly encountered a 1 meter tall flightless owl. The owl was reported to have still been present on the island during the colonization by the Spanish and the British, so it is likely that any sightings of the Andros Island Barn Owl by the colonizers of Andros Island would have only served to strengthen the lore of Chickcharney. It was once the old-growth pineyards were deforested that Tyto pollens lost its habitat and went extinct in the 1600s.
Tyto pollens is noted to be very similar to another fossil owl, Tyto ostologa (Wetmore 1922) from cave deposits in the Republic of Haiti. Tyto pollens is reported to be larger than the Quaternary-aged Tyto ostologa. This is what I find the most fascinating about the story of Chickcharney: giant owls were not an isolated phenomenon.
The likelihood that Tyto pollens (and also Tyto ostologa) had inspired and influenced the lore of the Chickcharney is fairly high: the timing is right for the geographical and temporal ranges of T. pollens and humans to overlap. However, I really want to know for sure. The next step in investigating the Andros Island Barn Owl is to check documents written during the time period that Tyto pollens was still with us (a.k.a. extant) to see if there was any direct mention of a sighting of a giant owl or of a Chickcharney. I’ll be excited to see what turns up!
References:
Bahamian Folklore: https://web.archive.org/web/20070828074515/http://bahamian.dynamohosting.net/bol/index.php?option=com_jd-wiki&Itemid=98&id=wiki%3Abahamian_folklore
https://itsmth.fandom.com/wiki/Chickcharnee
Tyto pollens:
Wetmore A. 1922. Remains of bird from the caves in the Republic of Haiti. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 74(4): 1-6.
Wetmore A. 1937. Bird remains from cave deposits on Great Exuma Island in the Bahamas. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 80(12): 1-7.
Marcot BG. 1995. Owls of the old forests of the world. General Technical Reports. Portland, Oregon. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, 1-72.
Lisa G. Buckley, Ph.D. 
