Stymphalian Birds

Also Known As: Ornithes Stymphalides; sometimes counted among the Birds of Ares
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A flock of man-eating birds armed with heavy bronze beaks, and in some accounts metal feathers they could loose like arrows.
Role in Mythos: They were the quarry of Heracles’ sixth labour, cleared from the marsh of Lake Stymphalis in Arcadia.
Relation to Humans: They devoured people and ravaged the farmland around their lake until the countryside emptied. Pausanias records a savage Arabian kind whose beaks pierced any armour of bronze or iron, so that hunters had to wrap themselves in thick cork.

The reeds around Lake Stymphalis grew so tall and so dense that a man standing on the shore could not see the water through them, and out of that green wall came a sound like hail striking a helmet. It was the clatter of beaks. The birds nested in their thousands in the marsh of northeastern Arcadia, packed into the thickets where nothing could reach them, and when they rose together the noise rolled up the wooded slopes and sent the farmers below hurrying indoors. The lake fed them and hid them, and for a long while that was enough to make them the masters of the valley.

They were about the size of a crane and shaped something like the sacred ibis, but where the ibis carries a slender curved bill these carried a straight beak of bronze, blunt and powerful. Their plumage had a dull metallic sheen in the flat marsh light. The oldest tellings vary on how far the metal went. Some describe wings of bronze from which the birds could shake loose their feathers to fall like a rain of darts, which is why later writers kept confusing them with the arrow-shedding Birds of Ares that the Argonauts met on an island in the Black Sea. Pausanias, who went to Stymphalos and stood in the temple there, was more restrained about the Arcadian birds themselves, though he passed on a traveller’s report of an Arabian breed with the same name whose beaks drove clean through iron.

In the ordinary run of things they did what hungry birds do, only larger and worse. They came down on the ripening fields in a dark sheet, stripped the grain, fouled the furrows, and carried off whatever small livestock strayed near the water. People who went to hunt them did not always come back. The land around the lake went quiet and untended, because nothing that walked upright was safe near that reed bed at dusk.

Where they came from depends on who is telling it. One strand of the tradition makes them the birds of Ares, reared by the war god and sharing his taste for slaughter. Another, preserved by Apollodorus, has them fleeing to the lake in fear of wolves, gathering there for safety and then multiplying past all reckoning until the refuge became a plague. A stranger version, credited to Mnaseas, holds that they were not birds at all but the daughters of a man named Stymphalos and a woman named Ornis, and that Heracles killed them because they refused him hospitality. That last account leaves an odd footprint at the shrine, which is worth coming back to.

The problem landed on Heracles as the sixth of the labours set by Eurystheus. It was not a fight so much as a puzzle. The marsh was too soft underfoot to march across and too thick to wade, and the birds sat deep in cover where an archer had no clean shot. Force was useless against numbers like that. What broke the deadlock came from Athena, who obtained a set of bronze noise-makers, krotala, forged by Hephaestus for exactly this purpose. Heracles climbed a height beside the lake and shook them. The clashing bronze tore through the marsh, and the birds, who could not endure the racket, burst up from the reeds in panic. As they wheeled screeching into the open air he brought them down with his arrows. Some say a sling. The sources do not entirely agree on what happened next either: most have him shoot the flock to pieces, while Peisander of Camira says he only drove them off, scattering them for good. A thread of the myth follows the survivors east to the island of Aretias, where they wait in the Argonauts’ story to trouble another set of heroes.

Their strength was always in the mass of them and in that bronze armament, beaks and, in the fuller accounts, feathers that could turn a hunter’s own gear against him. The Arabian cousins in Pausanias make the point plainly: bronze and iron were no protection, and the only defence anyone found was cork, soft enough to snag and hold a beak the way birdlime holds a sparrow. But for all that menace they carried a fatal flaw, and it was not physical. They could not stand noise and open sky at the same time. The thing that made them formidable, their habit of massing thick in the reeds, was exactly the thing that undid them, because once a great clanging drove them all into the air together they were nothing but a crowd of targets against the clouds. Strip away the marsh and the numbers, and a bird is a bird.

What remains of them sits in the sanctuary Pausanias visited at Stymphalos, a temple of Stymphalian Artemis with an old gilded wooden image. Carved near the roof, among other figures, were the birds themselves. And standing behind the building, cut from white marble, were maidens with the legs of birds, as if the two versions of the story, the flock and the inhospitable daughters, had both been set in stone and left to keep each other company.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Stymphalian Birds?

The Stymphalian Birds were a flock of monstrous man-eating birds in Greek mythology that infested the reed marsh of Lake Stymphalis in Arcadia. They had heavy bronze beaks, and in some accounts metallic feathers they could shoot like arrows. They devoured people and destroyed the surrounding farmland until Heracles cleared them out.

Why did Heracles have to fight the Stymphalian Birds?

Driving out the Stymphalian Birds was the sixth of the twelve labours set for Heracles by King Eurystheus. The birds had made the lake and its countryside uninhabitable, and no one had been able to reach them in the dense marsh vegetation where they nested in vast numbers.

How did Heracles defeat the Stymphalian Birds?

Heracles could not cross the soft marsh or shoot into the thick reeds, so Athena gave him bronze rattles that Hephaestus had made. Standing on high ground, he shook them to create a terrifying din, which panicked the birds into flight. As they rose into the open, he shot them down with his arrows, though one version says he only drove them away rather than killing them.

What did the Stymphalian Birds look like?

According to Pausanias, the Stymphalian Birds were about the size of a crane and resembled the ibis, but with straight, powerful beaks of bronze rather than the ibis’s curved bill. Some tellings also give them bronze wings and metal feathers that could be launched at their prey.

Where did the Stymphalian Birds come from?

The sources disagree on their origin. In one tradition they were the birds of the war god Ares; in another, told by Apollodorus, they fled to Lake Stymphalis to escape wolves and then bred out of control. A different account by Mnaseas claims they were originally the human daughters of Stymphalos and Ornis, killed by Heracles for refusing him hospitality.