Stymphalian birds

Have you remember the Sixth Labour of Hercules? After Hercules returned from his success in the Augean stables, Eurystheus came up with an even more difficult task. Hercules was to drive away an enormous flock of birds which gathered at a lake near the town of Stymphalos. Hercules had no idea how to drive the huge gathering of birds away. Goddess Athena, noticing the hero's plight, gave Hercules a rattle called a krotala. Climbing a nearby mountain, Hercules clashed the krotala loudly, scaring the birds out of the trees, then shot many of them with feathered arrows tipped with poisonous blood from the slain Hydra. The rest flew far away, never to plague Arcadia again. Hercules brought some of the slain birds to Eurystheus as proof of his success.

The Stymphalian birds are man-eating birds with beaks of bronze, sharp metallic feathers they could launch at their victims, and poisonous dung. They are described in different ways, but most commonly as voracious birds of prey, which attacked even men, and which were armed with brazen wings, from which they could shoot out their feathers like arrows. All armour of bronze or iron that men wear is pierced by the birds; but if they weave a garment of thick cork, the beaks of the Stymphalian birds are caught in the cork garment, just as the wings of small birds stick in bird-lime. These birds are of the size of a crane, and are like the ibis, but their beaks are more powerful.

In Greek Mythology, these birds were pets of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Although Mnaseas, a Greek historian of he late 3rd century BCE, told they were not birds, but women and daughters of Stymphalus and Ornis, in the temple of the Stymphalian Artemis, however, they were represented as birds, and behind the temple there were white marble statues of maidens with birds' feet.

The 2nd century A.D. travel writer, Pausanias, trying to discover what kind of birds they might have been, wrote that during his time a type of bird from the Arabian desert was called "Stymphalian," describing them as equal to lions or leopards in their fierceness. He speculated that the birds Hercules encountered in the legend were similar to these Arabian birds.

In popular culture

• In the 2003 real-time strategy game Age of Mythology: The Titans, the birds are available as flying units for the Atlantean culture.[13]
• In the 2005 Hercules miniseries, these birds are portrayed as harpies, while in the 2013 Atlantis TV series, they are portrayed as pterosaurs.
• They also make an appearance in The Sea of Monsters, the second novel in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series by Rick Riordan.
• The birds feature in the episode 'Before The Flood' of the 1980s animated TV series Ulysses 31

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