Attentive readers know that here at Hooting Yard we are always on the lookout for news about pits, be they bottomless pits, viper pits, pits of doom, or similar. So here is a thrilling article about a Pit of Death, which also features green slimy things and brine shrimp lethality tests!

Which reminds me that a correspondent recently sent in this photograph from the Telegraph:

“France still produces abominable sulphurous State-made matches (the manufacture of matches being a State monopoly). The label designs are sometimes poor and the colouring crude… One of the earliest German labels, issued in 1835, illustrates, by drawing, how to ignite the match by rubbing it on the box. Even the most ignorant person knew how to light a match, and the label appears a very futile one.” – A J Cruse, Matchbox Labels Of The World, With a History of Fire-Making Appliances from Primitive Man to the Modern Match, together with a History of the World’s Labels (1946).

Further opinionated matchbox label observations are likely to follow, so watch this space. Many thanks to Ed Baxter.

Peacay, the onlie begetter of BibliOdyssey, draws my attention to the excellent Book Of Accidents Designed For Young Children (1831).

I’m sure this must have been a set book for the tinies of Pang Hill Orphanage. The anonymous author “conceives he cannot render a more important service to the rising generation and to parents, than by furnishing them with an account of the accidents to which Children, from their inexperience or carelessness, are liable. If generally studied it will save the lives of thousands, and relieve many families from the long and unavailing misery attendant on such occurrences”. Among the potential mishaps addressed in this invaluable book are Playing With Horses, Worrying Dogs, Scalded At The Table, Playing With Fire-Arms, Falling Out Of A Coach, and Troubling The Cook.

There are some sample pages here, where you will also find a link to the entire book online.

More exciting ornithology news from the Telegraph!

Corncrake. Brink of extinction. Dove-sized. Coots and moorhens. Hay meadows. Rural. Devastated. Insistent crek-crek. Scythes. Tractors. Scotland. Crofting. Rasping double call. Distinctive. Through the night. Hand-reared. Acclimatised in pens. Nene Washes. Floodplain meadows. Significant miracle. Corncrake project.

But this is a mere summary. Read all about it here.

1. A raven called Dot-son-paa created the world.

2. Startled blackbirds emit piercing cries because they think they are about to be attacked by demons.

3. Each legion of the Roman Army had a Pullarius, whose job it was to look after the cage of sacred chickens they carried with them.

4. If a dove flies over a coal mine, disaster is likely to follow.

5. The souls of unbaptised children take the form of nightjars.

6. Cuckoos in Herefordshire buy horses at a country fair, and sell them at another.

7. Beowulf was reincarnated as a woodpecker.

8. Every single corncrake in Siberia got there by riding on the back of a crane.

9. If you want to provoke someone to commit suicide, send them a picture of an owl.

10. A splinter of wood from a coffin will keep sparrows at bay.

11. If you drink boiled magpie broth you will go mad.

12. If a woman befriends a stork, it will bring her jewellery.

13. In an apotheosis, an eagle is hidden behind a blazing waxen image of a dead emperor, and released when it has melted away.

14. Epileptics can transfer their illness to a chicken by carrying it three times around a well and then spending the night with it asleep under a church altar.

15. It is a good idea to place a wooden diver atop a tall post at the corner of a grave.

16. Robins can speak Latin.

17. Jesus turned a woman into a lapwing after she baked him a cake.

18. On every beach there is a magic stone that cures blindness, but only swallows know how to find it.

19. One way to find gold is to carry with you a stone vomited up by a crane.

20. If you hear a cuckoo before eating your breakfast, ill fortune will follow, possibly to include a loss of feeling in your arms and legs.

21. Nightingales used to be one-eyed, but borrowed the eye from a blindworm and never returned it.

22. Ireland has been called “the swan abounding land”.

23. Pelicans are the most pious of birds.

24. To avoid being bitten by a rabid dog, tuck the heart and right foot of an owl under your left armpit.

25. Cranes migrate south for the sole purpose of launching savage attacks on miniature people, about seven inches high, who they gobble up.

26. You can protect your house from lightning strikes by keeping a blackbird in your living room

27. Crossbills watch over children who fall asleep in direct moonlight and may therefore otherwise come to harm.

28. If bird eggs are incubated by frogs, the birds that hatch from them, irrespective of the parent birds, will be stonechats.

29. Migrating quails are terrified of the sea, and shut their eyes when crossing it, thus often colliding with ships.

30. Nail a dead owl to your barn to protect against storms.

31. The earth was created from mud collected by white-billed divers.

32. If you eat roasted swallow, you are likely to be attacked by dragons.

33. A crossbill tried, but failed, to wrench the nails from Christ’s cross during the crucifixion.

34. You can kill gnats and flies with a handful of soil taken from where you are standing when you hear a cuckoo call.

35. If you are lucky enough to find a stone known as an alectorius in the gizzard of a chicken, you will become invisible.

36. The Virgin Mary decided to marry Joseph after she saw a dove land on his head.

37. Three Roman emperors died after owls perched on the roofs of their villas.

38. If you dissolve the eyes of a quail in water, then mix with oil and rub it onto a burning rag, you will take on the appearance of a devil on fire.

39. Eagles can look at the sun without blinking.

40. The god Asmodi appears in the form of a goose and envelops Frisian peasants in darkness while they engage in sex orgies.

41. Cuckoos turn into birds of prey around June or July.

42. Widowed doves only drink from muddy puddles after dark.

43. Barnacle geese are hatched from shells attached to waterlogged timbers tossed along the sea, and are at first like gum.

44. You will be admired by everyone you meet if you keep in your pocket the eyes of a hoopoe.

45. It is advisable to be sitting down when you see a swallow.

46. If you hear a lapwing call, you should throw a bowl of water into the air.

47. Kingfishers live on riverbanks because they are searching for Noah’s Ark.

48. Magpies have a drop of human blood on their tongues.

49. When putting on a play, avoid having any peacock feathers on stage, or disaster will strike.

50. Nightjars attack cattle with their beaks and give them a disease known as puckeridge.

51. You will not get a proper night’s sleep if you have the heart and eyes of a nightingale in your bed.

52. Pelicans are known to set fire to themselves by flapping their wings excessively near bonfires.

53. You can forecast wind direction by hanging a dead kingfisher upside down from a length of thread, and watching which way its breast faces.

54. The liver of a hoopoe, pounded to a pulp and mixed with crocus, is a surefire cure for lung disease.

55. The god Odin had two pet ravens called Hugin and Munin, who spent all day flying around the world, returning at night to perch on his shoulder and tell him what they had seen and heard.

56. If you are holding a robin when it dies, your hand will never stop shaking.

57. On Sundays, rooks sit quietly on branches and do not carry sticks in their beaks.

58. To encourage rainfall, it is a good idea to get some swallows and throw them into a pond.

59. Sometimes you should pretend that a wren is a beast of enormous size, and drag a dead one into town on a wagon drawn by four oxen.

60. There are some trees which fall into the sea and become birds.

My source for much of this information is Flights Of Fancy : Birds In Myth, Legend & Superstition by Peter Tate. Highly recommended.

“Black hair announces cowardice and great craftiness, excessively yellow and pale white hair, such as the Scythians and Celts have, reveals ignorance and clumsiness and wildness, and that which is gently yellow points towards an aptitude for learning, gentleness, and skill in art. Unmixed fiery hair like the flower of a pomegranate is not good, since for the most part their characters are beastlike and shameless and greedy. Legs which are very hairy with thick black hair indicate slowness at learning and wildness. Those whose loins and thighs have lots of hair separately from the other parts of the body are very lascivious.”

Quoted in The Philosophy Of Physiognomy

Sensible Peter Hitchens has made some judicious comments about the cardboard and chickenwire strategy game Grovel With Dampier. He rightly points out that it is “squalid mind poison” and “mental slurry”, riddled with “toxic fantasies” which turn those who play it into “desensitised amoral husk[s]”. Harsh but true.

The 2nd of May 1793 : “Sad, blowing, wintry weather. I think I saw an house martin.”

A reminder to readers not to forget your daily readings of The Natural History Of Selborne.

“I was once advised by an old man of the hills that ‘sheep have only one ambition in life and that is to die’. No truer words were ever spoken about this nervous and confused animal.” – Paul Heiney in today’s Times

The estimable Miss Hathorn at Mustard Plaster has alerted me to this BBC audio clip (read by Leslie Phillips!) telling me how to cook a cormorant. I feel considerably cheered up, and so will you.

Enthralled by legendary and authentic monsters of the sea? Go here.

From Morbid Anatomy, “surveying the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture”.

From yesterday’s Grauniad:

Trevor Howard, the star of the 1945 movie Brief Encounter, earned the respect of his peers recounting his brave military past, parachuting into Nazi-occupied Norway and taking part in the Allied invasion of Sicily. After his death, Public Record Office files revealed that he had been invalided out of the army and judged to be mentally unstable with a “psychopathic personality”.