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Once Upon a Feather: A Field Guide to Fantastic Birds

Are you into birds, fantasy, or mythology? Then you have come to the right place! Explore this page for videos, coloring pages, bookmarks, playing cards, and more!

Once upon a time, there were birds…

Humans have been fascinated by birds for hundreds of years. People in all different parts of the world and from different cultures have featured birds in their mythologies, legends, and folklore, sometimes giving them supernatural abilities and appearances. What did these birds look like? Once Upon a Feather brings thirty of these birds to life with full-color illustrations and cool facts about each one’s life history, behavior, range and role in stories. A fantastic introduction to the endlessly exciting worlds of mythology and ornithology!

Once Upon a Feather invites you to meet all kinds of amazing birds! Want to know more about…

…the Fenghuang, a pheasant-like bird from Chinese mythology that symbolizes balance and whose appearance foretells an era of harmony?

…the Bennu Heron, a wading bird from Egyptology that inspired the modern-day stories of the Western Phoenix?

…the Yaffingale Woodpecker, a special Green Woodpecker variant whose drumming and calls bring rain across Europe?

These and 27 other birds are waiting for you inside this fantastic field guide. Complete with range maps, cool facts, and photographs, this book will help you learn all about fantastic birds while helping you understand the connections between birds of myth and living birds.

Mythic Bird Monday Episodes

Meet the birds of Once Upon a Feather! Learn the behind the scenes of how each bird was created, extra cool facts, and meet my mythic bird stuffies! Also enjoy these fun extras available for you to print for personal or educational use. To print, click on the image, then right-click to save or print.

Some fantastic thank-yous!

Funding to complete this project and to conduct my field research in Japan and South Korea was generously provided by the William C. Mullen Foundation. Professor Mullen was the incredible mythology teacher at Bard College who inspired my paper on Zeus and eagles in 2012. Both the beginning and completion of this project could not have happened without him!

List of Legends

The launch of Once Upon a Feather was made possible thanks to some truly amazing people who supported this project through Kickstarter. I cannot thank you enough for helping to make this project a reality!