Guhuoniao
The is a legendary bird from Chinese folklore.
It is described in such texts as the Western Jin natural history work , and consulted by the Ming period pharmacopoeia Bencao Gangmu which collates information from various works.
Nomenclature
The guhuoniao has had several aliases, such as ,,,, , ;,. It later earned the additional name.General description
The wench bird, according to the, is a kind of demon-spirit that takes human lives, according to the "Record of the Mysterious Center". That is to say, it extracts the two types of human soul, the and , according to Chen Canqi. It can transform from bird to human woman by shedding its "hair". It is said to be the spirit of a woman who died giving birth to a child. Thus it has a pair of breasts at the front of its chest.It has the habit of kidnapping infants to raise it as its own. It flies by night and marks the child with a drop of its blood. This will cause the child to fall ill and develop convulsions, in an illness condition called "innocent's ". This infant casualty was purportedly frequent in Jingzhou, China.
The wench bird shares certain aspects with the bird maiden type women described in the Western Jin dynasty period work who can transform back and forth from birds to women by donning or disrobing their "robe-hair". Added to this are aspects of the of the which steals other people's children. Thus the aka "wench bird" is thought to be a product of the fusion of several Chinese legends. The Tang period Youyang zazu notes that the is a pregnant woman who died in childbirth and turned into a bird, as also given in the Bencao Gangmu.
Relation to Japanese folklore
The bird is also explained in the Edo Period Japan encyclopedia Wakan Sansai Zue as . This entry gives an extract from the account, followed by commentary on the according to Japanese local legend and folklore. The encyclopedist's opinion is that this is no such thing as a woman turned bird, and this must be some bird species formed from the concentration of yin poison. In Japan, this is supposedly a gull-like bird, with a similar bird-call, which frequents beaches in the West; it appears suddenly on a lightly raining dark night, and a strange phosphorescent fire will accompany wherever it shows, according to the residents of Kyūshū. It is said to transform into a woman with child, and beg humans to carry its child, but the timid who flee may incur its hatred and come down with shuddering chills and high fever that can be fatal. However a stalwart person who accepts the request to carry the child comes to no harm.There is also a similar legend in Ibaraki Prefecture, where it is said that when a child's clothes is hung up to dry at night, a yokai called ubametori would deem the child as her own, and mark its clothes with poison milk from the yokai's own breasts.
As for the borrowing of Chinese name guhaoniao for the equivalent Japanese lore of or, one commentary is that the Chinese yaoguai and the Japanese got conflated in the early Edo period, while another commentator thinks the syncretism with Chinese lore was probably done deliberately by some intellectual privy to knowledge about the Chinese guhaoniao.
Fauna identification
No ornithological identifications are given for this creature in Unschuld's translation proper for either "wench bird" or "demon chariot bird". and Li Shizhen insists these are different birds, However, the companion dictionary to the Bencao Gangmu lists both and as a "goatsucker" i.e nightjar. This concurs with the "goatsucker " identification previously given by Arthur Waley.The Japanese translation of the Bencao Gangmu has a marginal note offering ichthyologist 's conjecture that "wench bird" might be a bird of the owl family. It is not clear what this is based on. However, Bencao Gangmu on "demon chariot bird" may provide certain hints. The "demon chariot bird" is like a cang, but oddly different, thus called a "strange cang". The bird also looks like a xiuliu bird, which is a type of owl and flies in the dark at night, gathering mosquitos.
Minakata Kumagusu identified the xiuliu as a long-eared owl assigning the outdated Latin name Strix otus, and noted that the there is folklore about the strix in areas of Syria that they enter through open windows and kill infants. Minakata suggests that some nocturnal birds with mottled patterns on the chest may appear to have "paps" or lactating breasts, with the male and female often difficult to distinguish in certain species. And since an owl disgorges pellets that might be found in nests, this may have led to a legend in China that the owl fosters clumps of clay, which may have contributed as an element to the legend of the guhuo niao bird.
Edo Period thinker Hirata Atsutane reflected on the legend of the guhuoniao dripping blood on a house or a child at night, and compared this to the actual habits of kites, crows, and owls carrying food which sometimes dribbled blood that leaked right through the grass-thatched roof, which was taken as a sign of ill omen in many parts of Japan.