[Loch-Ruadh] tree-geese

[Madelina de Lindesay]

from my Forgotten English page-a-day calendar:

"In the earliest surviving account of tree-geese, from 1186, a British monk, Giraldus Cambrensis, reported that they 'are produced from fir timber tossed along the sea, and are at first like gum.  Afterwards they hang down by their beaks as if they were seaweed attached to the timber and are surrounded by shells.  Having thus in the process of time been clothed with a strong coat of feathers, they fly freely away into the air.... I have frequently seen with my own eyes more than a thousand of these small birds, hanging down on the seashore from one piece of timber, enclosed in their own shells and already formed.'  This dubious life cycle provided Church elders with a rationale for eating goose during an otherwise meatless Lent."

(Tree-geese being a name given to barnacles from their supposed metamorphosis into geese....)

I've also heard monks used to eat rabbit fetuses (feti?) during Lent, as they didn't consider them meat since they had not been born yet.  Personally, I don't get the reasoning.


--Madelina