Asakiyume mita

A lot of what we saw and learned in the Amazon is taking me a while to digest because it's filtered through Spanish: I scribbled things down that people told me, but now in slow time I have to check what I wrote, find out if I heard things correctly and understood them correctly.

I just discovered a wonderful thing. While we were in Puerto Nariño (the other major town, other than Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon)--a town, incidentally, with a large number of Tikuna (Magüta) residents, including our guide that day, Edgar--we heard some birds singing, birds that Edgar told us were called paucares. "They imitate the sounds of other birds. Like just now, they're imitating oropendola birds." He pointed to long, hanging nests up in a tree. "They make those nests, and when they're finished with them, people like to use them for decorations."



(Pretty terrible photo; I must have been shooting into the sun)

"Because they're such clever imitators, indigenous people used to [or still do--I didn't catch the tense on this] feed their children the brains of the bird, so the children would grow up smart too, like the bird," he said.

I wanted to chase down what bird this is in English/Latin nomenclature, and lo and behold, it is the very bird that I picked for Káurë New Day to be named after in my story "New Day Dawning." I picked the bird because it was pretty and because I could find the Tikuna/Magüta name for it--and it turns out to be a very significant bird!

For example: we also learned that clans among the Tikuna/Magüta are divided among those with feathers and those without (traditionally, if you were in a clan with feathers, you could only marry someone from a clan without, and vice versa--this is not so much the case nowadays). I knew one of the feathered clans was the garza (Spanish word, not Magüta word), or heron, but it turns out paucar is another!

So Káurë New Day's name has all this extra resonance now--and I got to hear some of their namesake birds!

Another paucar story, popular in Peru: a little boy who loves spreading rumors and gossip about people is turned into a chatty bird--the first paucar. As a paucar, he continues spreading stories, but according to this version of the story, "Con el correr de los años, este pajarraco se ha convertido solo en anunciador de buenas noticias, de tal manera que cuando canta, la gente dice que algo bueno va a ocurrir"--over the years he takes to spreading only good news, so that people say that when he sings, something good will happen.

You can listen to another version of the story here (5-minute video in Spanish), and if you jump to 3:59, you can see káurë's familiar and pretty form. In this version too, he switches to spreading good news, so that seems to be the reputation of the bird.

This all makes me very happy!