Oozlum Bird

Also Known As: also Ouzelum Bird, Oozlum, Oozleum; kin to the one-winged Weejy Weejy Bird and the American Oozlefinch
Region/Culture: Oceania (the Australian bush tall-tale tradition, with a parallel life in British folk humour)
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore, English Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It flies backwards, and in the better-known version it flies in a tightening spiral until it disappears up its own backside.
Role in Mythos: The oozlum bird is the punchline of a tall tale, told deadpan to newcomers as a real animal of the far outback.
Relation to Humans: It exists to be described to someone who has not heard of it yet, usually in a bar, usually by a man who claims to have seen one. In the one full narrative anybody wrote down, a station hand saddles one and rides it to Sydney and back inside a day.

Out past the Peak, on the track that runs from Birdsville toward Cooper’s Creek, the heat comes off the gibber in sheets and buckles the horizon into water that is not there. This is where the bird lives. It goes over high and fast with its tail pointed the way it is travelling, and it does that, according to the man telling you, to keep the dust out of its eyes. He says it entirely straight. He has a beer in front of him, which is the correct posture for the whole subject.

The oozlum bird is one of those creatures that arrives fully formed as a sensible answer to a stupid question. Why does it fly backwards? Dust. Or vanity, because the tail feathers are the good end and the bird likes to keep an eye on them. Or, in the version that has done the most work over the past century, because while it does not know where it is going, it does at least like to know where it has been.

Then there is the other tradition, and it is the one most people meet first. Startle an oozlum bird and it goes up hard, banks, and begins to circle. The circles tighten. They keep tightening, past the point where any bird could hold the turn, until the creature threads itself through its own tail and vanishes with a small sound into a place it cannot get back out of. This is offered as an explanation for why the species is so seldom seen. It is a joke about self-destruction dressed as ornithology.

The word turns up in print in 1858, in the writing of the English journalist George Augustus Sala, and the Oxford English Dictionary, which files it as a mythical bird displaying ridiculous behaviour, cannot do better than guess that somebody had ouzel in mind, the old name for a blackbird. That is the whole of its ancestry. There is no bush spirit behind it, no bestiary entry, no priest or ethnographer to consult. It was made up by English speakers with a taste for nonsense, and it has been passed hand to hand ever since by people who mostly knew they were lying.

Its fullest life is Australian, and it belongs to one poem. In December 1897 the Sydney Sunday Times printed The Oozlum Bird by W. T. Goodge, an English-born versifier who had jumped ship at eighteen, worked a station out west, and spent the rest of his short life writing comic verse for country papers. The poem was collected in his book Hits! Skits! and Jingles! two years later. In it a wood-and-water joey called Ginger Joe, described without affection as old, ugly, dirty and capable of lying like Ananias, holds forth in the bar of a place called the Jackeroo’s Retreat about the fastest thing in creation.

The story he tells is this. At Marengo station, sixty miles beyond Birdsville, McTavish the manager has a small son who falls sick with fever, and the only medicine that will help is in a chemist’s shop in Sydney. By rail and pack from Bourke it is a week away, and the boy does not have a week. Ginger Joe gallops in to Birdsville to send the wire, and while he is waiting for his drink a telegram arrives from Sydney. It is signed by Jock McPherson, a Scots jackeroo who was standing in the station yard that same morning. Got here all right. Got the medicine. Am just leaving. Ginger Joe decides he has the horrors and orders another beer.

McPherson’s method, delivered the next morning to a man who had ridden all night, is the finest piece of physics in Australian verse. He had studied science before he came out. He knew the earth turns eastward. So he saddled the oozlum bird, took it up some miles above the plain, and simply waited while the continent rotated beneath him until the Sydney Domain came round underneath. Then down, up George Street, into the chemist, out again, wire sent, and back into the air. Asked how he managed the return trip, since the earth was still going the same way, he said he came the other way. Six and twenty hours, the whole world once around, and the boy sleeping peacefully in his bunk by the time Ginger Joe got home. The township, he adds, is called Birdsville because of that ride, and if you doubt any of it you can look at a map.

Goodge gives the bird the only body it has ever had. It is as big and wide across as an albatross, it can be caught and saddled and ridden, and it flies tail-first for the sake of its eyes. It is also, since McPherson’s trip, impossible to get near. That is the ordinary fate of tall-tale animals. They are always plentiful in the previous generation.

The family extends. Somewhere along the way a mutant appeared with only one wing, the weejy weejy bird, which circles faster and tighter than the parent stock and therefore disappears sooner. In 1905, at Fort Monroe in Virginia, a Coast Artillery captain named Merriam reported a large-eyed featherless bird outside the officers’ club, possibly with chemical assistance, and the oozlefinch was born. It flies backwards, for the dust, at supersonic speed, and it tears enemy bombers out of the sky. Two armies now treat it as a mascot, which is a great deal of institutional weight for a bird that began as somebody’s evening.

The bird’s powers all follow from the same source, which is that it is not encumbered by being real. It outruns racehorses, cyclists and steamships. It rides the rotation of the planet. It carries a man across a continent between breakfast and the following dawn. Its weaknesses follow from the same place. It cannot be produced. It cannot be photographed. It cannot survive a listener who declines to be impressed, and in its most famous form it cannot even survive itself, because a spiral that keeps tightening has exactly one destination.

That last property is why the thing has outlived the joke. Writers reach for the oozlum bird whenever an argument starts feeding on its own tail, and the reach is usually not gentle. Reviewing a book about online misinformation, the New York Times quoted the mathematician Charles Seife’s verdict that Wikipedia, like the mythical oozlum bird, has the ability to fly around in ever decreasing circles until it flies right up its own rectum. The bird went into a Carry On film in 1970 as the object of a jungle expedition, and it ran as a standing gag on BBC radio, where the explanation offered was that young oozlums fly perfectly straight and the trouble only begins when they turn left.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Oozlum Bird?

The Oozlum Bird is a legendary comic bird of Australian and British folklore that flies backwards. In the most widely repeated version it flies in ever-decreasing circles when startled until it disappears up its own backside, which is offered as the reason nobody ever sees one. It is a tall-tale creature rather than a figure of ancient myth.

Why does the Oozlum Bird fly backwards?

Sources give three competing reasons, all of them jokes told with a straight face. It flies tail-first to keep the dust out of its eyes, or to admire its own tail feathers, or because while it does not know where it is going, it likes to know where it has been.

Where does the Oozlum Bird come from?

The word appears in print in 1858 in the writing of the English journalist George Augustus Sala, and the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it may have been suggested by ouzel, an old name for the blackbird. The creature’s fullest treatment is Australian: W. T. Goodge’s poem The Oozlum Bird, printed in the Sydney Sunday Times in 1897 and collected in his 1899 book Hits! Skits! and Jingles!

What happens in the Oozlum Bird poem?

A station cook called Ginger Joe tells how a jackeroo named Jock McPherson saddled an oozlum bird to fetch medicine for a sick child at Marengo station. McPherson rose several miles above the plain and let the earth rotate eastward beneath him until Sydney arrived, bought the medicine, wired ahead, and was home within twenty-six hours. Asked how he returned, he said he came the other way.

Is the Oozlum Bird related to the Oozlefinch?

Yes, though the Oozlefinch is a separate American offshoot. It was first reported in 1905 at Fort Monroe, Virginia, by a Coast Artillery captain named Merriam, and it is a featherless bird that flies backwards at supersonic speed to keep dust out of its enormous eyes. It became the unofficial mascot of the US Coast Artillery and later the Air Defense Artillery.