Chickcharney

The pineyards of Andros do not sound like other Bahamian woods. Caribbean pine stands thin and grey and oddly evenly spaced, the fallen needles take the noise out of a boot, and the wind arrives as a dry hiss instead of a rustle. Up in that canopy, according to people who have spent their lives beneath it, something is hanging head down and taking an interest in you, and it is holding on with three toes.

It is about eighteen inches tall. Beyond that the descriptions pull in different directions, which is what happens to a creature nobody has ever pinned to a table. Some make it a bird, an owl or something in the line of a frigate bird, feathered and fearsomely red-eyed. Others make it a small man in feathers, with a toothless mouth and a beard the colour of flame, and pink eyes that do not blink when they find you. It is credited with a prehensile tail. Its head is said to turn the whole way round, which on a dark branch means there is no angle from which you are not being looked at. A guide from Lowe Sound named Rudy Knowles, who told a visiting writer in 1966 that he had watched them from a respectful distance, put it more gently than the books do: it has a black ring around its neck, and it looks like a dove, and it makes nests you can see in the trees. He added that he did not say anything against them.

The nests are the crux of the whole business. A chickcharney is supposed to build by hauling the tops of two trees together and lashing them into a single crown, so that its house sits on a pair of living stilts. This is a lovely piece of folk engineering and also a trap, because the stilts are timber, and timber is what men on Andros went into the bush to get. Fell the wrong pine and you have not merely inconvenienced a small feathered person. You have brought its roof down.

Picture the ordinary version of the encounter, the one that happens far more often than any confrontation. A man is walking a bush track at dusk with a load on his shoulder, the resin smell of the pines coming up warm off the ground, and he feels the particular prickle of being watched from above. He does not look up. He shifts his grip, presses his thumb and little finger into his palm, holds up the remaining three fingers so the thing in the branches might take him for kin, and keeps walking. That is the whole ritual. It costs nothing and it is understood to work.

The men who do look up tend to end up in stories. One of them, in Rudy Knowles’s telling, was a settlement man who refused to believe in any of it and announced that if they showed him a nest he would laugh straight into it. Two carloads of people drove him out to a nest. He climbed up and laughed into it. Every one of the eight tyres on those two cars went flat where they stood.

The famous case is grander and drier. In the 1890s a young Englishman was on Andros running a sisal plantation belonging to his father, and he wanted a railway line across the property. That meant taking down a particular tree. The Andros men would not touch it and said so plainly, so he brought a crew over from Nassau and had it cut anyway. The plantation failed. The young man went home, and rather more than forty years later an Andros man who had been there on the day of the felling heard in Nassau that Britain was at war and that the same Englishman was now Prime Minister. Neville Chamberlain’s Munich agreement, on Andros, has an explanation that has nothing to do with Czechoslovakia.

Where the chickcharney itself came from is a question with three competing answers and no settled one. Travel writing about the island preserves a claim that the whole thing was invented in the late nineteenth century by a Nassau sportsman who wanted his Andros duck grounds left alone, and another that Seminoles arriving from Florida brought the story with them. The third answer is the one that has stuck, and it belongs to a named modern author with a date on it. In 1995 a United States Forest Service forester, Bruce G. Marcot, wrote in a technical report on the world’s old-forest owls that an extinct barn owl relative called Tyto pollens had been a flightless bird a metre tall living in the old pine barrens of Andros alongside early human settlers, and that its territorial displays had probably given rise to the chickcharney. It is a satisfying idea and it has been repeated everywhere since.

It is also further from the bones than it sounds. Alexander Wetmore described Tyto pollens in 1937 from cave material that a Mrs. Vivienne Knowles had picked out of earth dug for fertiliser on Little Exuma. The Smithsonian’s survey of Bahamian fossil vertebrates knows the bird from that cave and from Banana Hole on New Providence, where it had been eating hutia by the hundreds. Nothing of the kind has come out of Andros. The metre-tall flightless owl of the Andros pineyards is a description written in 1995, not a specimen.

The powers follow straight from the grudge. A chickcharney gives good luck to anyone who treats it well and hard times to anyone who does not, and its memory is long enough to reach a man in another hemisphere decades later. It is nocturnal, it is quick through the canopy, and it appears to be able to reach anything a person owns, from a farm to a set of tyres. Its limits are equally plain. It is bound to Andros and travels nowhere. It does not hunt anyone, and it seems to have no interest in a person who leaves its trees alone. Courtesy is a complete defence, and three fingers held up is the cheapest insurance in the Bahamas. Nobody has produced a chickcharney. On Andros this is not regarded as much of an argument.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a chickcharney?

A chickcharney is a small feathered creature from the folklore of Andros Island in the Bahamas, roughly eighteen inches tall, with red eyes, a beard, and three toes or fingers on each limb. It lives in the island’s pine and cottonwood canopy and is said to hang upside down from branches. Its head is described as turning the whole way round.

What happens if you disturb a chickcharney?

Damaging a chickcharney’s nest, or felling the trees it is built on, is believed to bring lasting misfortune. Treating one well is said to bring good luck instead. The best known example is the failure of Neville Chamberlain’s Andros sisal plantation in the 1890s, blamed on his decision to cut down a tree the local men refused to touch.

How do you protect yourself from a chickcharney?

Androsians who believe in them press the thumb and little finger into the palm and hold up the other three fingers, so that the chickcharney may mistake the hand for one of its own three-fingered limbs. Avoiding its nests entirely is the other defence. Ordinary politeness is considered sufficient.

Is the chickcharney based on a real animal?

In 1995 the United States Forest Service forester Bruce G. Marcot proposed that the legend came from Tyto pollens, an extinct relative of the barn owl, which he described as flightless and a metre tall in the pine barrens of Andros. The fossil record is less obliging. Tyto pollens is known from cave deposits on Little Exuma and New Providence, and no remains of it have been found on Andros.

Where do chickcharnies build their nests?

They are said to build by pulling the tops of two trees together and binding them into one crown, leaving the nest standing on a pair of living stilts. The nests are described as visible from the ground in the pineyards of Andros. Cutting down either supporting tree is the surest way to make an enemy of the occupant.

Related Entries

Lusca, Jumbee, Douen, Soucouyant, Boo Hag, Baccoo, Ciguapa, Hupia, Zemi, Loup-garou, Leprechaun, Far Darrig, Duende, Menehune, Strix