Goofus Bird

Also Known As: Henry H. Tryon prints it as the Filla-Ma-Loo Bird with Goofus as the alternate; also the Flu-Fly Bird, and Phillyloo is a neighbouring name in the same camp lore. Tryon’s mock-Latin tag, Fulica stultusregrediens, is a joke of his own making and not a zoological classification
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore, Cryptids
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It flies tail first, because it has no interest in where it is going and a keen interest in where it has been.
Role in Mythos: It is one of the joke animals of the Great Lakes logging camps, told in the bunkhouse at night to raise a laugh and to take a new man in.
Relation to Humans: Nobody was ever hurt by a Goofus Bird, which makes it unusual company among critters that ate axe handles and dropped timber on people. Its whole purpose was to be described with a straight face to somebody green enough to believe it.

It comes over the cutover tail first, rump into the wind, one black wing beating against one pink one, and it has not the faintest notion where it is going. It does not want to know. An old lumberjack gave the reason for this in a single line that has outlived him and nearly everything else about the camps: it doesn’t give a darn where it’s going, it only wants to know where it’s been.

That line was written down in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1935, by Charles Edward Brown, who ran the museum of the State Historical Society and spent decades collecting what loggers said to each other after dark. His pamphlet put the bird on the Big Onion River, nesting near one of Paul Bunyan’s old camps, and filed it under the plain heading of birds alongside creatures with square eggs and a single wing. Brown was honest about his methods in a way that later collectors rarely managed. The material, he wrote, came from sources reliable as well as unreliable and doubtful, and the stories were told in the bunkhouses at night to make mirth or to frighten the greenhorns. Both purposes were served at once. A new man who had never seen a timber wolf could be persuaded of almost anything, and the sound of thirty men not laughing is its own kind of pressure.

Four years later the bird got its full portrait. Henry H. Tryon’s Fearsome Critters, published at Cornwall, New York, in 1939 and illustrated by Margaret R. Tryon, headlined it as the Filla-Ma-Loo Bird and gave Goofus as a second name, then went at it with the deadpan of a field guide. A turkey head on a long bottle-green neck, that neck sparsely spangled with large silver scales. A black right wing and a pink left one. Tryon noted, with obvious satisfaction, that this combination ought to be impossible to miss, and that reliable sightings were nonetheless scarce. A bird you cannot fail to see and nobody ever sees. That is the whole trick of the genre in one sentence.

You hear it before anything else. Tryon put the call at the clank of a Johnson bar shoved into reverse, which in a logging camp meant the heavy lever that threw a steam engine backwards, a noise of metal on metal followed by a shriek of released steam. Men who worked around donkey engines and locomotives knew that sound in their teeth. Giving it to a bird was a small piece of cruelty aimed squarely at anyone who had spent the day next to one.

The nest is built upside down. Seven eggs to a clutch, and they are invariably Grade D, which was the lowest mark the egg graders of the period handed out and a grade no farmer wanted stamped on his crate. The record never says what becomes of eggs laid into an upturned nest, and the silence is deliberate. Press the question and the man telling it will look at you steadily and wait, and then everybody else in the bunkhouse will know exactly how long you have been in the woods.

The bird keeps company that works on the same principle. On the neighbouring slopes of Bunyan’s Pyramid Forty, Brown puts the Gillygaloo, a hillside plover that lays square eggs so they cannot roll away down the grade, and the jacks boiled them hard and used them as dice. Above the cone of a nearby hill circles the Pinnacle Grouse, which has one wing and can therefore fly in one direction only, forever. Each of these takes a real inconvenience of the northern woods, a steep pitch or a long featureless winter, and answers it with an anatomy. The Goofus answers the oldest one of all, which is that a man in a logging camp had a great deal of past and very little future to look at.

Its one real ability is the flight itself, sustained and controlled and entirely backwards, which no bird manages and which follows perfectly from the only thing anyone claims to know about its character. The bird has a flawless view of its own history. Every tree it has passed, every slope it has cleared, every mile behind it is available to it in full. What it cannot do is see a thing coming. It is a creature built entirely out of hindsight, and the joke lands because hindsight was the one commodity the camps had in surplus.

The weaknesses come from the same root. A bird that will not look forward cannot hunt, cannot navigate toward anything, and cannot choose a destination; it can only accumulate a past. Its colouring, which should make it the most conspicuous animal in the northern woods, somehow never produces a witness. And its name will not hold still. Tryon’s Filla-Ma-Loo lost out to Goofus in the end, with Flu-Fly trailing behind, and the Phillyloo Bird flapping along upside down in the next paragraph of Brown’s pamphlet to keep it company.

It kept the better name and travelled further than any of them. Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero collected it into The Book of Imaginary Beings, where it sits among Chinese dragons and Kafka’s creatures with a two-line description that says only that it builds its nest upside down and flies backwards. A joke invented by men sharing a stove in the pine country ended up in a library of world monsters, which is a longer flight than the bird itself ever managed, and in the correct direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Goofus Bird?

The Goofus Bird is a joke animal from the logging camps of the Great Lakes region of North America, said to fly backwards and build its nest upside down. It belongs to the family of tall-tale creatures known as fearsome critters, told in bunkhouses to amuse the crew and take in new workers. It was written down by the Wisconsin folklore collector Charles E. Brown in 1935 and described at length by Henry H. Tryon in 1939.

Why does the Goofus Bird fly backwards?

Because it does not care where it is going and only wants to know where it has been. That explanation comes straight from a lumberjack quoted in Charles E. Brown’s 1935 pamphlet and is the entire logic of the creature. Tryon’s version puts it more formally, calling the bird distinctly low in intellectual curiosity and consistently indifferent to its destination.

What does the Goofus Bird look like?

Henry H. Tryon describes a turkey-like head on a long bottle-green neck sparsely spangled with large silvery scales, with a black right wing and a pink left one. He also notes that a colour scheme that striking ought to be impossible to overlook, and yet confirmed sightings are rare. The contradiction is part of the joke rather than a gap in the record.

Is the Goofus Bird the same as the Filla-Ma-Loo Bird?

Yes. Tryon’s 1939 Fearsome Critters lists Filla-Ma-Loo as the primary name and Goofus as an alternate, along with the Flu-Fly Bird. Goofus became the common form in later use. The Phillyloo Bird, which flies upside down, is a separate creature from the same body of camp lore.

Did anyone believe in the Goofus Bird?

No, and that was never the point. Fearsome critters were openly absurd stories told with a straight face, and the entertainment came from watching an inexperienced logger try to work out whether the teller was serious. Brown recorded that such tales were told at night to create mirth or to impress and frighten the greenhorns.