October 1, 2026 • 56 mins
The scarecrow watches over the field, but does it watch us back? Does it keep the birds away, or does it deter darker fiends from these haunted lands? Join Robert and Joe for a Halloween-season look at the science, culture and folklore of scarecrows.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And now October is actually here.
It's not just jumping the gun like we were earlier
in the week. So if you have been with us
on the podcast for a while, you know our tradition,
which is that every October, all month long, we fill
the show calendar with seasonally creepy stuff. So our core
(00:36):
episodes are going to be about all things haunted, gory,
and bewitched. And Weird House Cinema episodes for this month
are all going to be horror movies. So as we
often do, we got started on the celebration a little
bit early, earlier this week when it was still September.
with the first part in a series on the scarecrow,
(00:57):
which is a topic I think I've wanted to do
in the Halloween season for several years. We finally got
around to it. So in that first episode earlier this week,
we talked about and read pieces from the Nathaniel Hawthorne
short story Feathertop from 1852, which is about a scarecrow
that is brought to life on the whims of a
(01:17):
New England witch. Maybe part.
In part, just feeling the day out, part trying to
get some revenge on a magistrate judge. She brings a
scarecrow to life and then sends it off to woo
the judge's daughter. And in the end of the story,
it is used to illustrate a point the author wants
to make about human falsity and our general lack of
(01:38):
character and substance. And after that, we went through a
short taxonomy of horror scarecrow types, including the scarecrow as
illusion or false man. The scarecrow as a kind of
straw zombie and the scarecrow as religious icon, a sort
of lord of the fields or agricultural deity. And we'll
(02:00):
come back to that theme in today's episode. After that,
we talked about precedent for the scarecrow principle in nature,
exploring the question of whether there are any non-human animals involved.
that make a false copy of their own body form
out of inanimate objects to guide the behavior of other
(02:22):
animals or to trick them. Answer to that question seems
like a solid maybe. The most interesting potential example, Rob,
that you found was in the behavior of certain spiders.
But after that, we talked about a couple of interesting
references to scarecrows or human effigies more generally in the
Hebrew Bible. And today we're back to keep the Scarecrow
(02:45):
Talk going.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah, yeah, we have a lot to talk about. And
as is always the case, you know, we get into
one of these topics and it just makes us a
little more alert to how widespread a given thing is
in our surrounding culture.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Are you also botter-meinhoffing everything we do on the show? Suddenly,
as soon as you're researching it, it's everywhere.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Yeah, you know, it becomes an obsession for a week
or two. But also, you just have heightened awareness. For instance,
this morning, me and my family were looking up different
Asian snacks and treats that you can order in bulk online,
and we ran across these Bin Bin rice crackers. I've
(03:27):
included an image here for you, Joe, and folks at home,
you can look up images of Bin Bin rice crackers.
It often has a scarecrow on the label. Certainly, the
version that came up for me initially has a cute
little scarecrow, very much a, The exact sort of scarecrow
that you would expect to find just throughout, you know,
autumn and Halloween imagery definitely here displayed for the cute factor.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Though to my American eye, it reads as Christmas colors
because it's like red and forest green and white. So
it's kind of scarecrow by way of the nutcracker.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, yeah. And certainly, you know, scarecrows of different types
have long been associated with agricultural practices and certainly something
like this might have been used in an Asian rice field.
But I also wouldn't read too much into this particular
scarecrow because I was able to pull up other examples
of bim-bim crackers that had like snowmen on the front.
So I think cute is mostly the reason here.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
What's the common thread there? You could say both inanimate
representations of human body forms placed in the area surrounding
one's home and under different circumstances. Maybe both could be
cute or creepy.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, and I guess these also might be seasonal labels,
you know, where it's like, okay, it's autumn, people like scarecrows.
So who doesn't love a cute scarecrow? Let's put one
on the label, that sort of thing. I mean, that's
just how ubiquitous the scarecrow has become. You know, and
I think more often than not, it's not presented to
something scary. It's just something sort of quaint and folksy,
(05:01):
non-threatening to just about everyone, really. which kind of leads
into our next discussion, right? Right.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
So we wanted to talk about the question, does Scarecrows
actually work? Sometimes you think about it and you're like,
could birds be that dumb? Does it really work on them? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
And this is where the Scarecrow iconography comes into place
because I don't think this is something you find in
like a particular work of art. I think this is
more of like pop and folk art and just sort
of like general art autumn, fall, Halloween decorations. But a
lot of the time, what do you see on a scarecrow?
You see a crow or a raven or some sort
of a bird perched there on its shoulder. And even
(05:43):
though it's maybe not explored a lot in the content
or the message has been kind of lost via repetition,
but there's a general sense that this technology must not
work all that well because the bird is right there
on the shoulder. How much scaring is this thing actually
pulling off?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Bird perching on or even attacking the scarecrow is a
motif that goes back into ancient literature, as we will
discuss later today.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
So it seems like built into our understanding of it
is this idea that it doesn't work. So to back
up a little bit, we'll remind everyone that scarecrows, again,
are a specific tactic found in the larger category of
bird scaring, by which humans attempt to disrupt avian behavior
by scaring them. And there are plenty of active ways
(06:28):
to scare birds, including using loud noises, which was one
of the many bird scaring and bird killing techniques used
in the Eliminate Sparrows campaign of China's Great Leap Forward,
which ultimately killed hundreds of millions of sparrows, resulting in
ecological imbalance. So this is certainly one of those tactics
(06:48):
that does work. And it's worth noting that bird scaring is,
in general, is also something animals do without technology. Like
you don't need technology to scare a bird. Um, there, there,
a bird is going to be aware of its environment
and it's making a lot of, um, judgment calls based
on perceived threats in its environment.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
I scare birds every time I take out the garbage.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
I mean, I walk around the corner, go past the
bush and then something flutters out, flies away. So yeah,
I didn't even know it was there.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
The advantage of using a scarecrow, uh, is, of course,
that it's generally a passive rather than active technology. Now,
certainly there are examples where you have someone actively out
there in the field to scare the birds. But here,
that person can take a break, and you just leave
an effigy in its place. You use a decoy in
(07:42):
its place. And then the question is, does this actually work? Well,
we ran across some good sources on this. We do
want to highlight that there's a great Mental Floss article
from 2023 by Mark Mancini titled, Do Scarecrows Actually Work?,
which provides a nice overview and cites some key studies,
which we're gonna walk through some of these here, but
(08:03):
I highly recommend that Mental Floss article for a nice
brief overview if you wanna check that out. One of
the sources that's cited in this is bird harassment, repellent,
and deterrent techniques for use on and near airports by
Gerald L. Bellant, which actually breaks down different bird scaring
techniques including various visual tactics that range from effigies or decoys,
(08:28):
like we're talking about here, to things like mirrors and
lights and lasers.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Oh, Din, in airports, have they ever actually used traditional scarecrows,
like clothes stuffed with straw?
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I don't know the exact answer to that. It seems
like I wouldn't rule it out, but I think for
the most part, they're past that. They're into figuring out
what will work more dependably. But the effect, as the
author here outlines, you can achieve this via visual stimuli
that's just novel or startling. It can be something the
(09:02):
bird might associate with danger. It can be the actual
visual presence of real predators, dogs or falcons, a simulated predator,
the result of a predator attack, a dead body, for example,
dead birds, that sort of thing, or something just unfamiliar
that the bird is going to avoid. Because again, the
(09:23):
bird is going to be, bird or birds are going
to be making these judgment calls, this active threat analysis.
And it might not even be like, oh, I think
there's a predator down there. Maybe I shouldn't land there.
It could just be like, I don't know what's going
on down there. So it's not worth the risk. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
And a lot of prey birds are just going to
play it safe. You know, if it's questionable, why mess around?
Speaker 2 (09:43):
But broadly speaking, the author here points out that the
use of effigies like scarecrows The effectiveness is just going
to really depend on the type of effigy you're using,
the species being targeted, and what you're trying to keep
them away from.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
So, like, it makes a difference. whether the target that
you're protecting is high value or not?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So citing a 2002 study from Gilsdorf
et al., he points out that scarecrows are on the
whole more effective if they have realistic human shape and
realistic facial features. And I found that interesting because if
you look at scarecrow dressings, sort of the stereotypical scarecrows,
(10:28):
you'd assume that birds must be very forgiving of shape
and face because it's generally a bit rough around the edges, right?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
I always assume when I see a scarecrow with a face,
that face is just there for the person making the
scarecrow to have fun with.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
That's art. That's art.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
I saw some just doing some image searches where the
face is a bird's face. Like they decided to get
that playful with it. But I mean, it sounds like
the face is important and you can't just draw any
old thing on there. It needs to be somewhat realistic. Wow. Yeah.
So I was surprised by this, but it seems like
it makes a difference. And then citing a 1990 study
(11:06):
from Littauer, he points out that bright color can also
increase detectability. This study, by the way, involved, and there
are a number of these that get into this sort
of area, using mechanical pop-up scarecrows to add movement to
the scenario. So that's something you see in a lot
of these. The realization that the scarecrow is not going
(11:26):
to be that effective. What it needs is some sort
of random lunging involved, and that's going to involve some
sort of mechanical apparatus or something.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Let's see. He also points to a couple of studies
that demonstrated success with humanoid scarecrows at ponds in one
1980 study resulting in a 95 percent decline in birds
visiting that pond. So extremely effective in that study. But
it concerns, you know, keeping ducks away from a pond. Again,
species and areas of the determine are going to be
key here. Like, what are you trying to keep away?
(11:57):
What are you trying to keep them away from?
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
And then, let's see, citing a key 1986 paper by
Cummings et al., they point out an important factor in
all of this is that, and this is something you
see time and time again in any kind of study
involving scarecrows, is that over time, birds seem to just
get used to the scarecrow. They realize that it's not
an actual threat. It's not a real person, no matter
(12:21):
what it looks like. And additionally, sometimes feeding patterns are
just like too deeply ingrained in the birds to keep
them away from the food source that you're trying to protect.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
So what exactly does that mean?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
So it's like if I stop at the same breakfast
burrito place every Thursday and then one day it looks
like there's an actual slasher killer out in front of
the restaurant, I might just skip it that day and
go on. But if it becomes clear or at least
likely that it's not a real slasher killer and I'm
so set in my ways that I'm coming by here
anyway for my fix, then I'm probably not staying away
(12:56):
for long. And birds are pretty much the same, you know,
as we've discussed before. They can be quite smart. And
in all cases, we're dealing with creatures that have evolved
to be fine-tuned exploiters of their own environment. And threat
analysis is part of that package. Okay.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
But if I'm understanding the feeding pattern thing correctly, it's
the idea that a persistence in a feeding habit may
be a stronger overcoming drive than, say, a bird trying
out a new location to feed or something.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and it's
just like two of the main factors here. So we'll
get into what this means here. So they also cite
an interesting 2002 study from Tillman et al., which found
that the use of effigies of dead vultures were highly
effective at keeping black vultures and turkey vultures away from airfields.
(13:49):
So this is a specific example of the whole, you know,
images of the dead or the actual dead. might make
the bird associate that with danger. Be like, that's a
place where buzzards go to die. That's not where I
want to go to.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
I wonder if it needs to specifically be the same
kind of bird that I am to scare me away.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
That's a good question. Yeah. I mean, I think that's
the way our minds often end up working. I was
reading a book titled In the Company of Crows and
Ravens by John M. Marsloff and Tony Angele. And they
mention the allegedly effective practice in the past of hanging
(14:29):
dead crows from the fence or some other structure to
keep their brethren away from, you know, like a crop,
because the idea is they would then associate the presence
of their own dead with danger. So I guess on
one level, we might match that up with the vulture
study here. But I have to stress, this also feels
a bit too much like the concept of human vengeance.
(14:51):
And human vengeance may often be feel like it's helping
and it may feel like it's emotionally solving a problem
while not actually solving a problem.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
That is the kind of thing I could imagine a
farmer of days gone by doing and thinking, yep, this
really works and whether it does or not. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
So I don't know, undecided on that because it does
seem like there is some study-based evidence that it works
with vultures at least. So who knows? Let's see. A
similar short term defectiveness seems to apply to predator stationary
effigies such as hawks. You know, this is where this
seems like it's also effective, but only in the short term.
(15:34):
Reading that some birds will mob owl effigies and knock
them over blackbirds and crows in particular. And this is
something in my own backyard. I have one of those
plastic owls overlooks our garden. And I'm always having to
pick it up. It's not positioned in a way that
I can ever observe what's happening. So it might just
be the wind. But I often think, oh, the birds
(15:54):
got it. The birds ambushed my poor plastic owl and
he's just laying useless on the ground.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
We've got a few plastic owls around the neighborhood. And
my daughter always thinks they're cute when we walk by.
And it just now occurred to me for the first
time that they might be scarecrows.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Well, it's one of those things like like scarecrows, like the.
the icon just becomes fun and separated from its usage.
I have a friend who has two of these in
his dining room. I know they're not keeping birds away
from any crops in there, but I think he just
ended up liking them or his kids liked them, so
they're just sitting in his living room. It's fine. Nice. Now,
(16:43):
I was also looking at a paper. This one is
frequently cited in articles covering scarecrow effectiveness. This is a
new wrinkle on an old method, successful use of scarecrows
as a non-lethal method to prevent bird damage to field
crops in Israel, 2006, by Nemtsov and Galili. And in
this one, basically what they found is that they would
(17:07):
put these yellow outfits on their scarecrows. After They've had
farmers wear yellow rain suits when they're conducting live bird
harassment activities or sometimes engaging in other activities. So there's
some sort of like active enforcement of the idea that
like yellow clothing, bright yellow clothing equals active human figures.
(17:31):
And then they're able to sort of enforce the effectiveness
of their scarecrows by doing this. Interesting. Okay.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
So they're getting to piggyback an extra association from the
fear lingering from like active discouragement by having that color there,
the color in common.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
It's almost like a form of advertising. Like you think
of like a complex advertising campaign. It's like you can
put the billboard out there. People are going to notice
it at first, but they're going to become blind to it.
You got to do other things. You need some radio spots.
You need some word of mouth. And in a way,
the yellow rain slicker idea here is kind of like
word of mouth. It's like, get the word out there.
(18:13):
Are you hearing about these scarecrows? They're really scary, man.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Well, it reminds me of those radio ads you used
to hear sometimes that would have traffic sounds in them,
like a blasting horn in the ad. You remember that?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Oh, vaguely. Yeah, I know this sort of thing. I
hate it when it even comes up in music or something.
It's like, come on, don't get anything alarming in there.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Yeah, but it gets your attention, doesn't it?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
It does, yeah. And yeah, I think that's a big
part of it because, you know, pretty much anywhere you look,
and this is something that Mancini drives some of that
mental flaws article as well, is that a stationary scarecrow
is just, it's only going to be effective in a
temporary fashion. Birds are going to learn, they're going to
adapt once they've figured out what the novel stimuli is
all about. And then there are just all these different
(18:55):
ways that people have jazzed it up. Mechanized movements, added lights,
the use of digital scarecrows with infrared eyes and supersonic
wave emitters. Apparently these are far more effective, but at
least speaking from the standpoint of Halloween and autumn decoration,
these don't really feel like scarecrows as much to me,
(19:17):
not in the traditional sense. It seems like we're getting
closer to the idea of robotic humanoid as opposed to
just scarecrow humanoid.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Isn't it funny that as a stimulus becomes more effective
at consistently scaring birds, it It becomes less scary to us.
It's less effective as a symbol for horror.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Like even just one that pops up and moves. That's
less scary than one just hanging there.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, it reminds me a little
bit of actually coming back to Halloween Haunted. attractions, you know,
haunted houses, if you will. Going through a really good one,
you're going to have a mix of different tactics. And
some of them are going to be very much some
sort of mechanical situation where it's just some sort of
a ghoul on sticks, essentially a scarecrow. And there's a timer,
(20:06):
there's some sort of hydraulic or some sort of mechanism
that just kind of launches it at you and then
draws it back. And that'll startle you for a second,
but then you laugh because it looks kind of stupid.
But a good haunted house is going to combine that
with live actors. And you might get like the one-two.
They love to do that, the misdirection of like, oh,
here's the fake mechanized thing. And then, oh Lord, here's
(20:28):
somebody in an actual costume. Yeah. So, yeah. So, again,
these sort of elements of deception are just widespread throughout
our culture.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
But can I posit something? So you go in the
haunted house and you get something that moves, bursts out
at you on a, you know, retractor rail or something.
And that's, oh, startled. Then you laugh. But the thing
you walk away thinking about that's in your nightmare later
was some static image from the haunted house.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Isn't it often? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're right.
And you certainly go through the haunted house with your
hackles raised. You're ready for things to jump out at you.
And then that wears off eventually after you leave the
haunted house. And it's the same with birds. After they
have stopped encountering the scarecrows, they're going to get used
(21:17):
to it. And then when they come back and the
scarecrows aren't doing anything different, you know, certainly if they're stationary,
they're going to get used to that as well. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
I guess on the human side, for the horror potency thing,
I think it's just like mysteriousness. Like an unmoving thing
is more mysterious. You wonder about it more.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Yeah, yeah. Now, the basic idea of just giving a
scarecrow some sort of movement, I mean, this in and
of itself goes back a long ways. You don't need
hydraulics or any kind of advanced technology to just make
a scarecrow move. If it's exposed to the wind and
you have the right construction... like that is going to
move it. You know, it might not easily enable some
(21:57):
of the lunging and launching movements found in some of
these studies, but it has historically allowed farmers in the U.S.
and Japan to do things like affix bells or other
noise-making implements to a decoy. I'm reminded, too, of basic,
you know, whirly gigs that have been used as bird deterrents,
moving and spinning when activated by the wind, connected in
(22:18):
principle to ancient wind power technologies for irrigation and and
wind detection, as well as just novelty toys. You know,
this idea that, oh yeah, the wind's blowing, you can
craft something that interacts with that wind.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
So to summarize and review on this, do scarecrows actually work?
The answer seems to be, it really depends. And so
your traditional non-moving scarecrow may work at first, but usually
most birds are going to get used to that over time.
Movement helps other different kinds of more exciting stimuli make
them more effective in most cases, but it's going to
(22:55):
depend on the type of bird, the thing you're trying
to keep the birds away from, and the bird's relationship
to that thing, and all of these intrinsic properties of
the scarecrow itself.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the more I think about it,
I think that this is all wrapped up, even at
like a subconscious level, in our fascination with the scarecrow,
because it does kind of represent this... idea that I'm
going to put a lot of work into something, or
at least a fair amount of work into something, and
then I'm going to solve my problems moving forward. And then,
you know, lo and behold, this kind of passive measure
(23:27):
isn't going to be effective very long. And it also
is kind of like an interesting, like, man and technology
versus nature scenario that reminds me of our recent Weird
House Cinema episode of Unknown Origin, the part where they're
talking about, like, man versus rat. You're thinking about the rat, what, 20%
of your day, maybe less. The rat's thinking about you 100%
(23:47):
of the day. And so the scarecrow is kind of
like this example of like, you chose to think about
the birds for a certain amount of your day, but
they are relentless. This is their, their all the time. Uh,
so eventually like they're just going to figure out what
you're doing unless you too are putting in the time
and finding ways to jazz up that scarecrow, uh, and
(24:08):
make it more effective. Hmm. Yeah. It's an active world
and passive measures are only going to be effective for
so long.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Well said. Well, Rob, are you ready to talk about
a sexual scarecrow?
Speaker 2 (24:31):
I trust you, so I will say yes.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
So one claim that I came across several times in
more general sources reading about the history of scarecrows was
the idea that in ancient Greek and Roman culture, the
functional role of the scarecrow was often played by representations
of a maybe surprising figure from the Pantheon, the god Priapus.
(25:02):
That name's probably ringing a bell with a lot of people.
Priapus is the Greco-Roman god associated with fertility, marriage, livestock,
gardens and fruits, and with male genitalia. In bodily form,
this is a male god depicted as having a huge,
often comically large erection. You can look up pictures for
(25:25):
yourself if you want to see them. Uh, uh, I've
got a few examples for you to look at here
in the outline, Rob. Uh, one thing I would say
is that of course there are lots of Roman depictions
of Priapus. Uh, you know, they were not shy about
depicting this God and they range from actually kind of
strangely solemn looking, which actually, which makes them funnier to
(25:47):
the ones that seem to be intentionally funny. So, uh,
I decided to look for references to this, uh, priapus
as scarecrow claim in credible academic works, and I found
that yes, indeed, it seems that if you brought up
the concept of a scarecrow to an ancient Greek or
(26:08):
Roman farmer, they might not think about a feed bag
stuffed with straw and a pumpkin head, but instead might
think first of a statue of a god with a
monstrous and holy phallus. So one good source I found
discussing this was a book called Birds in Roman Life
and Myth by a scholar named Ashley Green, who is
(26:31):
affiliated with the University of Melbourne in Australia. This book
was published by Taylor and Francis 2023. Uh, so the
book as a whole is focused on the significance of
birds in ancient Roman culture and covers a lot of stuff.
For example, uh, the role of birds in auspices, uh,
And things like attempts to attract songbirds to dedicated gardens
(26:54):
so that rich people could observe the songbirds for pleasure.
You know, cultivating bird gardens was apparently a thing for
the rich in ancient Rome. But there is specifically a
section entitled Pest Birds that gets directly into the subject
of these Praeapus scarecrows. So obviously, then and there, as
(27:15):
here and now, birds caused a lot of agricultural losses.
Green quotes a prayer to the goddess Ceres, the goddess
of agriculture and grain crops. And the prayer, I think
it's also a prayer to the earth figure, but to
Ceres and the earth. And the prayer says, forbid the birds,
pests of the tilled land, to devastate the fields of
(27:38):
corn with their destructive flocks. And note here, the reference
to corn would not be to maize crops, which we
often call corn today, but it would be the archaic
usage of corn, which generically meant like grains or seed crops. So,
you know, you could pray to Ceres, you could say,
please help protect my crops from birds, but sometimes you
(27:58):
need more than prayers. So Green writes, quote, Priapus also called,
I'm sorry if I pronounced this wrong, Mutinus Tutinus, is
an unmistakable Latin deity who promoted fertility and protected from
the evil eye. He also had the task of keeping
the household garden safe from its most common desecrators, namely
(28:23):
thieves and birds. So Green writes that to achieve this
protection from Priapus, the Roman farmer would put up a
wooden statue of the god in the garden, which had
a double function in It both worked as a shrine
to the God, so a kind of focal point for
(28:43):
worship of the God, and was physically functional as a scarecrow,
or at least was said to be. And I think
it's kind of fascinating to think about this. It's a
piece of religious technology. The statue of the God both
serves the religious purpose, it's representing the God to which
you direct your prayers for protection of your crops. And also,
(29:06):
by its very presence, the statue of the god is
at least a little bit literally efficacious at doing what
you're praying to the god for help with, like it
is scaring the birds. And it gets me thinking about
whether there are other examples of this, like religious objects
that in a physical mundane sense also do the thing
(29:27):
you're asking for the god's help with.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it basically gets
into this interesting scenario with an effigy. Like you can
raise an effigy with the pure intent of engaging in
bird scare, but that image is going to work on
us as well, and it's going to open, it's going
to engage with our own imagination and our certainly religious
(29:51):
and symbolic ideas. Like, you've You've committed an act here
that is going to resonate in the bird world and
the human world. And then how do we end up,
what do we end up doing with that?
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Yeah, that's a very good point. I almost feel like
we've gone backwards into this with scarecrows in more recent
literature where, you know, the scarecrow stuffed with straw out
in the field, you know, to the 19th century farmer
is probably not supposed to be a religious object of
any kind. It's just functional, but it keeps kind of
getting magic attached to it in all of our storytelling,
(30:22):
doesn't it?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Yeah, yeah. And just thinking about other decorations, thinking like
people just keep raising larger and larger skeletons in their
front yard, you know, for decorative purposes, for Halloween fun. But,
you know, at what point does it just become an
idol of the god of death at some point? You know,
not again, not in an intentional overt way, but like
(30:45):
in some like deeply resonating way concerning the way that
we engage with imagery.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Totally. So in this passage from the book, Green quotes
some texts, quotes some Roman literature and liturgy, filling in
texture on how people thought about Priapus' role in the garden.
So one of these quotes is, To the fruit-laden gardens
is given red Priapus as watch to scare the birds
(31:14):
with cruel billhook. Uh, and a note there, it describes
Priapus as red. What's going on with that? Uh, well,
I looked this up and it seems that statues of
Priapus were often painted red. Uh, and the God was
sometimes given epithets like the red or the crimson one.
It seems to have something to do with themes of
ripe fruit, but also maybe like, uh, potency and virility
(31:38):
and engorgement.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Uh, engorge with blood. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
And then, uh, in fact, the, uh, the next quote
in the book uses a similar epithet. It is, quote,
the crimson one who by his lewd image scares the
timid birds. So I really like that idea. It's like,
because he's a lewd, rude, crude dude that the birds
are scared.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. Sure.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Another one of these is Crimson Priapus, Glory and Guard
of Gardens. So to picture the standard Priapus scarecrow in
a rustic Roman garden, I think you should imagine a
wooden statue of a man with a possibly huge erect
penis painted blood red all over and then holding a
(32:26):
curved blade like a sickle or a billhook, sometimes decked
in garlands of produce from the most recent successful harvest,
but not necessarily always. Sounds kind of frightening and grotesque,
but Green writes that, quote, Priapus with his fearsome crotch
was dearly beloved by many Roman families. And Green mentions
(32:48):
the Priapia, which is a collection of these 80 anonymous
poems about this god from around the first century CE.
The Priapia describes this type of scarecrow as a protector
of the poor farmer. It seems kind of associated not
with rich farmers who own many, many lands and many fields,
(33:10):
but with the poor subsistence farmer or the rustic farmer
out in the country. So a friend and protector of
the poor farmer and a threat to thieves who would
come and take away his livelihood and his home. And
the passage also cites one of the satires of the
(33:30):
first century BCE Roman poet Horace, which is about a
wooden priapus statue. And the satire reads in translation, of course,
as follows, quote, Once I was a figwood stem, a
worthless log, when the carpenter, doubtful whether to make a
stool or a priapus, chose that I be a god.
(33:50):
A god then I became. A god then I became
of thieves and birds, the special terror. For thieves, my
right hand keeps in check. And this red stake protruding
from unsightly groin. While for the mischievous birds, a harundo
sat on my head, affrights them and keeps them from
lighting in the new garden. So I had to look
(34:14):
up what this harundo was. What does that mean? In
the general sense, it seems it's a Latin term meaning shaft,
which can have multiple applications. Could be the shaft of
an arrow or a fishing rod or like a reed.
In this context, though, Green explains that the harundo coming
off of Priapus' head is a limed reed. And I'm
(34:36):
not positive what that means, but I think that means
a reed coated in what was called bird lime at
the time. I think we've talked about this on the
show before. Bird lime was a kind of sticky, gluey
substance that you might smear on tree limbs or other
tools to intentionally trap small birds.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
So.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
At least according to Horus, the Priapus scares away human
thieves with its hooked blade and with the big erection,
and it scares away birds with a bird-trapping device, which
is also basically phallic in nature, attached to its head.
Green expresses doubts about whether the image of the Harundo
(35:18):
was actually any more frightening to birds than just a
regular statue. Like, I guess that is worth wondering about, like,
Do the birds know what a limed reed is when
they see it? Is that especially scary to them?
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah. Does it have dead birds affixed to it at
this point? Because if that's the case, that might play
into some of what we were talking about already. But
if there are no dead birds attached to it, then, well,
it comes down to how is the bird processing this image?
Speaker 3 (35:45):
That's a good point. If there are dead birds stuck
to it, that, I mean, that doesn't come up in
the source, but I wonder if that's just one of
those unspoken things that was part of the reality and
doesn't get mentioned in our, in our literature.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Open question.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Uh, but so, uh, anyway, this author green thinks that
the horrendous bird repelling properties might've been more magical or
symbolic than, than literally efficacious, but that would be an
interesting experiment to run. Like, I wonder if, Something like
that could actually have a repelling property, maybe in an
environment where there's a lot of trapping with bird lime
(36:20):
taking place.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
I don't know. Yeah. Something like that that's, again, enforcing
the image, right? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
But anyway, how effective were these scarecrows? You know, we
ask how effective are scarecrows in general? It depends on
a lot of things. How effective did ancient people think
the Priapus scarecrow was to protect their gardens? Well, again,
Green quotes that poem series, the Priapia. This line reads, quote,
And often by shouting have we driven away the old
(36:52):
raven and enthusiastic jackdaw who would with horny beak peck
your sacred head.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Well, there you go.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
So we got to defend the Priapus from the birds
that it's supposed to be keeping away.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah, so that makes it sound like they're effective as
they've always been. Yes.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
So despite some fearsome elements, birds can become rather accustomed
to the Priapus scarecrow, and they have to be driven
away from the shrine by human intervention. The Roman poet
Virgil advises farmers to use more active measures. Virgil says,
scare birds away with noise. And this can be screaming
(37:29):
at them, shouting, or using noise-making devices like rattles. Rich
Roman farmers could, of course, have people just work as
live bird skimmers in the fields. And this might mean
visual appearances or making noise, or it could even include
active use of the sling in the fields. But on
(37:50):
poor family farms, if anybody was going to be keeping
birds out of the gardens, it would probably be children.
Or you might just have to prey and depend on
prey apis and hope for the best. But for a
final bit of perspective, I thought this was pretty interesting.
Green is talking about, you know, Romans making these appeals
(38:12):
to the god Priapus to protect their gardens, to keep
their gardens safe from the birds. And then the author writes, quote,
There was a firm distinction drawn between delightful songbirds, welcome
in ornamental gardens, and pest birds, unwelcome in the fields
and gardens where families grew food. The act of appreciating
(38:34):
wild birds and taking pleasure from their appearance on one's
land was not something everyone could afford. Hence the elite
preoccupation with pleasure gardens. So I thought that was really
interesting as a principle that I think is still true
in many ways today that like wealth can alter the
meaning of nature for you. And so like in this
(38:55):
ancient Roman context, Your level of wealth and your labor
relationship to agricultural production totally changes the meaning of birds
for you.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Yeah, that's a great point. And I guess for many
of us, we kind of end up, especially as hobbyist gardeners,
we end up with kind of a foot in both worlds.
We don't depend on that garden in the backyard. We
don't want it eaten up by birds, so we do
things like buy a plastic owl plant. But at the
same time, on the other side of the yard, like
(39:26):
maybe in the front yard, we've got bird feeders up.
We've got hummingbird feeders up. And we're engaging in the
other end. We're having our own little pleasure garden. So
it's kind of interesting how we end up being situated
between the two. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Trying to find a balance.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah. Some birds welcome. Other birds, please don't. We're only
in the front yard, please. Do they obey? Um, my,
my birds. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I don't know.
We have such mixed use. I'm such an, such an
amateur when it comes to gardening. I really can't even
answer that. Something eats some, I think, I feel like our,
(40:02):
our own little backyard garden is, is more ravaged by, um, uh,
insects than anything though.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
That's my, my understanding.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Scarecrows don't work on insects.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
They don't, they don't. You gotta, well, they're too big.
You gotta make them real tiny. Right.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Um, Has anybody ever tried if you just throw a
bunch of those little plastic spider rings all over your garden?
Does that keep insects away?
Speaker 2 (40:24):
I don't know. I did not run across studies on
this particular topic, but it's possible somebody's looked into it.
I guess it comes down to a question of what
senses are you engaging in? And mostly with scarecrows, we're
talking about engaging the visual system.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Of the birds. Which have long line of sight.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
And then if we're engaging in these other things like noise,
we're engaging in sound as well. But with insects, you know,
maybe it comes more down to other senses. Not sure.
All right. We have one more scarecrow deity to discuss here.
(41:07):
And in this, we're going to get into Japanese culture
a bit. So Japanese traditional agriculture made use of scarecrows
in the form of which are indeed much like the
Western notion of the scarecrow, or at least they come
to be that, an anthropomorphic form to keep birds and
other beasts away from the crop, though with interesting connections
(41:30):
to odor-based techniques toward spirits away. And this remains at
least part of the wordage anyway. And I do want
to note here, this is again an area where we see,
you can imagine the scarecrow is a, An effigy with
a foot in both worlds, in the world of human agriculture,
(41:52):
but also in the world of human mysticism and religion
and supernatural concepts. Because you have other traditions, I was
running across some others as well, where you have something
like a scarecrow that has purely supernatural purpose. It's used
to keep spirits away. And so it's something to keep
(42:12):
in mind in all of this as well.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
So apparently kakashi is thought to be derived from the
word kagashi. Kagashi means sniffing. This according to a 2025
paper by Meiko Shogatsudani. I had to run this title
through Google Translate, but I believe the title is The
Scent of Warding Off Misfortune and Inviting Good Fortune, a
Case Study of the Custom of Making Someone Smell. I
(42:38):
did not attempt to run the full paper through translation
because I I figured it would end up getting some
things vitally wrong. But it does include an English language abstract,
and that's mainly what I was working off up here
with this one paper. The author mentions that the exact
sniffing-related practice is often lost in these things. It seems
(42:58):
that the older use of Kakashi was more based on
posting foul-smelling substances like rotting fish to ward off pests,
and that the practice remained when the switch to more
anthropomorphic scarecrows became more common. And this would have occurred,
to be clear, long before contact with Europeans or anything
like that. But then the smell aspect of the thing
(43:19):
eventually vanishes from usage as well. Interesting.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
So you say it begins probably with repellent odors and
then over time shifts to being visual, like anthropomorphic repellent.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
Yeah, that's my understanding. Or perhaps it's something along the
lines of like the word is associated with the odor-based repellents.
And you have visual-based repellents going on as well, but
then everything ends up being referred to by the same term,
and then the smell aspect of the thing kind of
goes away.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
Yeah. In the modern usage, it can be rather distant
from agricultural usage altogether. One famous example of this, and
listeners and viewers, you may have seen this on travel shows,
such as James May's Our Man in Japan, which I
watched several years ago and really enjoyed, in that he
visits this particular town. remote town of Nagoro in Shikoku.
(44:11):
And this is a rural community that has been greatly
depopulated in modern times. People, you know, certainly people, older
people dying, but then younger people moving off, often to
large urban areas. And the locals have taken to replacing
locals who have left or died with Kakashi dolls, making
(44:33):
it the Scarecrow Village or Kakashi no Sato. So more than,
and the paper, the articles I was reading about this
are at this point, I think several years old, but
like by 2020 standards, a lot of these were saying
there were like 300 of these to be found in
the town. And they appear, they're situated in little tableaus,
(44:54):
like they're doing farm work or local chores or having
a community meeting, that sort of thing. And the understanding too,
is that there are more scarecrows than humans in this
town at this point. Yeah, so the village has received
a lot of attention as like a commentary on the
trend of depopulation of remote villages for larger cities in Japan,
(45:15):
as well as kind of a way to illustrate and
maybe even a form of protest, but certainly to illustrate
this tension, this sense of loss felt regarding rural and
urban spaces, certainly in the Japanese mindset.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
That's really interesting. Do you ever read on whether these
effigies are primarily like aimed at the people who made them?
Did they make them for themselves? Like, was it an
act of comfort or something like that? Or more as
like an outward facing kind of work of art? Or
like you said, like maybe a protest, like a form
of statement?
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Well, I kind of get the impression that it ends
up serving both of these functions to some degree, but
I think is maybe more inward based at first. And then,
you know, then people from beyond the town began to
take notice and, you know, media visits and, you And
they're very inviting. I think when James May visited, they
ended up making a cacacea of him as well. So
(46:10):
he was added to the mix. So, you know, there's
a certain amount of, there's a seriousness to it, but
there also seems to be a certain amount of fun
to it and a certain amount of whimsy. But I
think ultimately it's illustrating a rather complex scenario that does
have its, you know, a sense of sadness to it
as well. And then coming to the idea of a god,
(46:30):
there is a Shinto deity in the mix in the
form of Kubiko. So one mention of this figure I
found in, I believe this is a 1926 work, A
Study of Shinto, the Religion of the Japanese Nation by
Genshi Keito. And the author writes of this and says,
and this is in translation, of course, Yamada no Sohato,
(46:54):
otherwise called Kubiko or the Crumbling Prince. which is nothing
but a scarecrow set up in rice fields to ward
off predatory birds, is a great fetish god who, quote,
knows anything and everything under the sun, even though it
is always kept standing still.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
Oh, that's an interesting duality. So if I read that right,
there's a kind of irony in this god in that
it is presented as maybe omniscient, but not especially potent
or completely impotent?
Speaker 2 (47:21):
I think that might be the case, but I think
there's also a sense of like, like studious dedication to
one's study and the idea that it's like, you know,
all you're doing is studying. You're not interacting with the world.
And in the stillness, you're accumulating knowledge and maybe becoming
more in line with divine knowledge.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
Okay, so maybe shouldn't be read as lack of ability
to act in the world, but that the standing still
is like a way of learning, sort of?
Speaker 2 (47:49):
I think so. But my first impression was very much
the same, thinking of like, oh, the scarecrow's just setting
up there It's not doing anything to actively ward off birds,
but is constantly observing, constantly taking in information. So, yeah, ultimately,
it's like a god of wisdom and agriculture. And as
(48:09):
I understand, still revered at certain shrines. There'll be certain
Shinto shrines that you'll find in Japan that are dedicated
to this particular deity. And I read more about it,
like the really sort of the origin of this deity
and certainly the... the high point of its popularity in
Denizens of the Unseen World, Gods, Spirits, Immortals by Anne Lothal.
(48:33):
This was, um, published in 2025, uh, as a chapter
in the book, In the Presence of Gods and Spirits,
Hirata Atsutani and His Collaborators. Uh, this refers to the
scholar and an important 19th century Shinto theologian, Hirata Atsutani,
who lived 1776 through 1843. And, um, So the author here,
(48:57):
she describes this entity, again, coming back to the god Kubiko,
as a minor 19th century god who then rises to
prominence specifically in 1869 when he's invoked, basically sort of
the mascot, if you will, in a more deeply set
(49:17):
religious manner, at the opening of a new national university.
And in Japan, this is a consolidation of historic Edo
period shogunal schools under the newly restored imperial rule. But
then his veneration quickly falls away again into relative obscurity,
just like a year later, because that school ends up
(49:39):
closing due to just chaotic infighting. They tried to take
these three centers of learning, cobble them into one, and
make them confirm to some different ideas about the nature
of education and scholarly pursuit. And I think the key here,
if I'm understanding correctly, and this is not an area
that I've done a lot of reading about, but I
think the idea is that this effort was also charged
(50:01):
with a sense of let's remove foreign ideas from education.
We don't want Confucius to be a part of this
because he is not purely Japanese. He's of Chinese origin.
We don't want the Buddha to be a part of this.
We want it to be more based in Shinto and
things off Japan. So she describes that the idea of
Kobiko is apparently based in part on much older rural
(50:25):
Japanese practices involving very agricultural scarecrows dressed as gods of
the rice paddy. combined with this idea of a medium
that could be imbued with divine knowledge. It would kind
of absorb and become a center of knowledge, divine knowledge.
And again, this concept was, I think, largely developed and
(50:49):
pushed forward by Shinto theologian Hirata Atsutani, who took it
as one of his personal deities and taught its veneration
to his students and Again, in large part as a
sort of a nationalist alternative to the veneration of foreign
Confucius or even Buddhist figures to align with the priorities
of the emperor after the Meiji Restoration. And this is
(51:13):
why it was chosen to represent learning at this school.
And then that's also why it ends up falling away.
So the closing of the Deities Associated School in 1870
takes away its base of veneration. But Atsutani apparently held
on to the concept and saw it as an ideal
one could sort of merge with personally. And again, the
(51:34):
entity does seem to live on as one of the
more obscure Shinto deities.
Speaker 3 (51:39):
And does the god still have these associations of like
wisdom or great sort of observation and learning about the world?
Speaker 2 (51:45):
I think so. I was looking at some images of
the shrines. And the shrines, I think to someone who
didn't know what they were looking at, you wouldn't think
it had anything to do with scarecrows. So I don't
know if the deity rather ends up kind of like
losing its scarecrow qualities as well in its, again, kind
(52:06):
of obscure form today. But it certainly was associated with
the scarecrow in its original conception.
Speaker 3 (52:14):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
Yeah. So there's a lot more to it than I thought.
I thought it was going to be more versed in
like full-fledged folk tradition. And it does have roots there,
but it also seems to be a product of You know,
more like sort of deeper Shinto theology and then also
essentially like political reorganization that was going on at the time.
Speaker 3 (52:37):
Do you know anything about the connotations of this other
name Kubiko has that the crumbling prince? It makes me
think of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story we read in part
one where the scarecrow is repeatedly described in terms of
like the old and tattered quality of the things that
make it up.
Speaker 2 (52:55):
Yeah, I think that is the case. I think it
does have to do with what a scarecrow looks like.
You know, that you can dress one up to look like,
you know, a god of the rice paddy or some
sort of a prince or something. But at the end
of the day, it's a scarecrow. It's going to be
out in the sun in the elements. Birds are going
to mess with it. It's going to get rained on
and so forth. The wind's going to blow on it
(53:17):
and it's going to degrade somewhat.
Speaker 3 (53:19):
And it's probably made out of stuff you were trying
to get rid of anyway.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
Old trash. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (53:24):
Also ironic in a way that you could have the
scarecrow as this image of wisdom and learning in this
one cultural context. Because he, in so many other stories
like these, you know, American or European stories we've been
talking about, the scarecrow is often the image of emptiness.
I think about, you know, the scarecrow in The Wizard
(53:46):
of Oz who lacks a brain, the scarecrow in the
Hawthorne story, which is totally symbolic of emptiness and insubstantiality.
Speaker 2 (53:54):
Well, maybe there's a sense of humility to it. I'm
a humble scholar. I'm like the scarecrow. I'm out here
exposed to the elements. I may not be chasing down birds,
but I'm actively absorbing information and becoming more in line with, again,
divine knowledge.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
There's almost a sense of mischief in that, in that
the scarecrow is a thing that is manufactured by the
farmer in order to be seen and not to see.
But then if you think about it from the scarecrow's perspective,
what has it to do but see, but to observe?
Speaker 1 (54:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
And then, as we've been saying, the scarecrow is swiftly
not seen anymore. Yeah. By birds, certainly, but also by people.
It just becomes a part of the landscape. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 3 (54:36):
Does that do it for part two?
Speaker 2 (54:38):
I think so. Yeah. Yeah. We touched on a number
of ideas I think we'll come back to in subsequent episodes.
So stick with us on that. But if you have
questions that roll in in the meantime, go ahead and
launch them our way. If you have field reports, like
sometimes literal field reports because we're talking about scarecrows, do
send those in because we would love to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (54:59):
Yeah, we will definitely be reading some scarecrow mail in
our first listener mail episode after October. So please send
it on in. Contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
Speaker 2 (55:09):
All right. As always, we just remind you that Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture
podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema. Wherever you get the show, we just ask
that you rate, review, subscribe. If you're watching on Netflix,
that's where the video version is, give us a couple
(55:30):
of thumbs up and ask to be reminded about new episodes.
Speaker 3 (55:33):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J.
Speaker 2 (55:36):
Posway.
Speaker 3 (55:37):
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
Thank you.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And now October is actually here.
It's not just jumping the gun like we were earlier
in the week. So if you have been with us
on the podcast for a while, you know our tradition,
which is that every October, all month long, we fill
the show calendar with seasonally creepy stuff. So our core
(00:36):
episodes are going to be about all things haunted, gory,
and bewitched. And Weird House Cinema episodes for this month
are all going to be horror movies. So as we
often do, we got started on the celebration a little
bit early, earlier this week when it was still September.
with the first part in a series on the scarecrow,
(00:57):
which is a topic I think I've wanted to do
in the Halloween season for several years. We finally got
around to it. So in that first episode earlier this week,
we talked about and read pieces from the Nathaniel Hawthorne
short story Feathertop from 1852, which is about a scarecrow
that is brought to life on the whims of a
(01:17):
New England witch. Maybe part.
In part, just feeling the day out, part trying to
get some revenge on a magistrate judge. She brings a
scarecrow to life and then sends it off to woo
the judge's daughter. And in the end of the story,
it is used to illustrate a point the author wants
to make about human falsity and our general lack of
(01:38):
character and substance. And after that, we went through a
short taxonomy of horror scarecrow types, including the scarecrow as
illusion or false man. The scarecrow as a kind of
straw zombie and the scarecrow as religious icon, a sort
of lord of the fields or agricultural deity. And we'll
(02:00):
come back to that theme in today's episode. After that,
we talked about precedent for the scarecrow principle in nature,
exploring the question of whether there are any non-human animals involved.
that make a false copy of their own body form
out of inanimate objects to guide the behavior of other
(02:22):
animals or to trick them. Answer to that question seems
like a solid maybe. The most interesting potential example, Rob,
that you found was in the behavior of certain spiders.
But after that, we talked about a couple of interesting
references to scarecrows or human effigies more generally in the
Hebrew Bible. And today we're back to keep the Scarecrow
(02:45):
Talk going.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah, yeah, we have a lot to talk about. And
as is always the case, you know, we get into
one of these topics and it just makes us a
little more alert to how widespread a given thing is
in our surrounding culture.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Are you also botter-meinhoffing everything we do on the show? Suddenly,
as soon as you're researching it, it's everywhere.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Yeah, you know, it becomes an obsession for a week
or two. But also, you just have heightened awareness. For instance,
this morning, me and my family were looking up different
Asian snacks and treats that you can order in bulk online,
and we ran across these Bin Bin rice crackers. I've
(03:27):
included an image here for you, Joe, and folks at home,
you can look up images of Bin Bin rice crackers.
It often has a scarecrow on the label. Certainly, the
version that came up for me initially has a cute
little scarecrow, very much a, The exact sort of scarecrow
that you would expect to find just throughout, you know,
autumn and Halloween imagery definitely here displayed for the cute factor.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Though to my American eye, it reads as Christmas colors
because it's like red and forest green and white. So
it's kind of scarecrow by way of the nutcracker.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, yeah. And certainly, you know, scarecrows of different types
have long been associated with agricultural practices and certainly something
like this might have been used in an Asian rice field.
But I also wouldn't read too much into this particular
scarecrow because I was able to pull up other examples
of bim-bim crackers that had like snowmen on the front.
So I think cute is mostly the reason here.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
What's the common thread there? You could say both inanimate
representations of human body forms placed in the area surrounding
one's home and under different circumstances. Maybe both could be
cute or creepy.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, and I guess these also might be seasonal labels,
you know, where it's like, okay, it's autumn, people like scarecrows.
So who doesn't love a cute scarecrow? Let's put one
on the label, that sort of thing. I mean, that's
just how ubiquitous the scarecrow has become. You know, and
I think more often than not, it's not presented to
something scary. It's just something sort of quaint and folksy,
(05:01):
non-threatening to just about everyone, really. which kind of leads
into our next discussion, right? Right.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
So we wanted to talk about the question, does Scarecrows
actually work? Sometimes you think about it and you're like,
could birds be that dumb? Does it really work on them? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
And this is where the Scarecrow iconography comes into place
because I don't think this is something you find in
like a particular work of art. I think this is
more of like pop and folk art and just sort
of like general art autumn, fall, Halloween decorations. But a
lot of the time, what do you see on a scarecrow?
You see a crow or a raven or some sort
of a bird perched there on its shoulder. And even
(05:43):
though it's maybe not explored a lot in the content
or the message has been kind of lost via repetition,
but there's a general sense that this technology must not
work all that well because the bird is right there
on the shoulder. How much scaring is this thing actually
pulling off?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Bird perching on or even attacking the scarecrow is a
motif that goes back into ancient literature, as we will
discuss later today.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
So it seems like built into our understanding of it
is this idea that it doesn't work. So to back
up a little bit, we'll remind everyone that scarecrows, again,
are a specific tactic found in the larger category of
bird scaring, by which humans attempt to disrupt avian behavior
by scaring them. And there are plenty of active ways
(06:28):
to scare birds, including using loud noises, which was one
of the many bird scaring and bird killing techniques used
in the Eliminate Sparrows campaign of China's Great Leap Forward,
which ultimately killed hundreds of millions of sparrows, resulting in
ecological imbalance. So this is certainly one of those tactics
(06:48):
that does work. And it's worth noting that bird scaring is,
in general, is also something animals do without technology. Like
you don't need technology to scare a bird. Um, there, there,
a bird is going to be aware of its environment
and it's making a lot of, um, judgment calls based
on perceived threats in its environment.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
I scare birds every time I take out the garbage.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
I mean, I walk around the corner, go past the
bush and then something flutters out, flies away. So yeah,
I didn't even know it was there.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
The advantage of using a scarecrow, uh, is, of course,
that it's generally a passive rather than active technology. Now,
certainly there are examples where you have someone actively out
there in the field to scare the birds. But here,
that person can take a break, and you just leave
an effigy in its place. You use a decoy in
(07:42):
its place. And then the question is, does this actually work? Well,
we ran across some good sources on this. We do
want to highlight that there's a great Mental Floss article
from 2023 by Mark Mancini titled, Do Scarecrows Actually Work?,
which provides a nice overview and cites some key studies,
which we're gonna walk through some of these here, but
(08:03):
I highly recommend that Mental Floss article for a nice
brief overview if you wanna check that out. One of
the sources that's cited in this is bird harassment, repellent,
and deterrent techniques for use on and near airports by
Gerald L. Bellant, which actually breaks down different bird scaring
techniques including various visual tactics that range from effigies or decoys,
(08:28):
like we're talking about here, to things like mirrors and
lights and lasers.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Oh, Din, in airports, have they ever actually used traditional scarecrows,
like clothes stuffed with straw?
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I don't know the exact answer to that. It seems
like I wouldn't rule it out, but I think for
the most part, they're past that. They're into figuring out
what will work more dependably. But the effect, as the
author here outlines, you can achieve this via visual stimuli
that's just novel or startling. It can be something the
(09:02):
bird might associate with danger. It can be the actual
visual presence of real predators, dogs or falcons, a simulated predator,
the result of a predator attack, a dead body, for example,
dead birds, that sort of thing, or something just unfamiliar
that the bird is going to avoid. Because again, the
(09:23):
bird is going to be, bird or birds are going
to be making these judgment calls, this active threat analysis.
And it might not even be like, oh, I think
there's a predator down there. Maybe I shouldn't land there.
It could just be like, I don't know what's going
on down there. So it's not worth the risk. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
And a lot of prey birds are just going to
play it safe. You know, if it's questionable, why mess around?
Speaker 2 (09:43):
But broadly speaking, the author here points out that the
use of effigies like scarecrows The effectiveness is just going
to really depend on the type of effigy you're using,
the species being targeted, and what you're trying to keep
them away from.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
So, like, it makes a difference. whether the target that
you're protecting is high value or not?
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So citing a 2002 study from Gilsdorf
et al., he points out that scarecrows are on the
whole more effective if they have realistic human shape and
realistic facial features. And I found that interesting because if
you look at scarecrow dressings, sort of the stereotypical scarecrows,
(10:28):
you'd assume that birds must be very forgiving of shape
and face because it's generally a bit rough around the edges, right?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
I always assume when I see a scarecrow with a face,
that face is just there for the person making the
scarecrow to have fun with.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
That's art. That's art.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
I saw some just doing some image searches where the
face is a bird's face. Like they decided to get
that playful with it. But I mean, it sounds like
the face is important and you can't just draw any
old thing on there. It needs to be somewhat realistic. Wow. Yeah.
So I was surprised by this, but it seems like
it makes a difference. And then citing a 1990 study
(11:06):
from Littauer, he points out that bright color can also
increase detectability. This study, by the way, involved, and there
are a number of these that get into this sort
of area, using mechanical pop-up scarecrows to add movement to
the scenario. So that's something you see in a lot
of these. The realization that the scarecrow is not going
(11:26):
to be that effective. What it needs is some sort
of random lunging involved, and that's going to involve some
sort of mechanical apparatus or something.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Let's see. He also points to a couple of studies
that demonstrated success with humanoid scarecrows at ponds in one
1980 study resulting in a 95 percent decline in birds
visiting that pond. So extremely effective in that study. But
it concerns, you know, keeping ducks away from a pond. Again,
species and areas of the determine are going to be
key here. Like, what are you trying to keep away?
(11:57):
What are you trying to keep them away from?
Speaker 1 (11:59):
Hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
And then, let's see, citing a key 1986 paper by
Cummings et al., they point out an important factor in
all of this is that, and this is something you
see time and time again in any kind of study
involving scarecrows, is that over time, birds seem to just
get used to the scarecrow. They realize that it's not
an actual threat. It's not a real person, no matter
(12:21):
what it looks like. And additionally, sometimes feeding patterns are
just like too deeply ingrained in the birds to keep
them away from the food source that you're trying to protect.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
So what exactly does that mean?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
So it's like if I stop at the same breakfast
burrito place every Thursday and then one day it looks
like there's an actual slasher killer out in front of
the restaurant, I might just skip it that day and
go on. But if it becomes clear or at least
likely that it's not a real slasher killer and I'm
so set in my ways that I'm coming by here
anyway for my fix, then I'm probably not staying away
(12:56):
for long. And birds are pretty much the same, you know,
as we've discussed before. They can be quite smart. And
in all cases, we're dealing with creatures that have evolved
to be fine-tuned exploiters of their own environment. And threat
analysis is part of that package. Okay.
Speaker 3 (13:12):
But if I'm understanding the feeding pattern thing correctly, it's
the idea that a persistence in a feeding habit may
be a stronger overcoming drive than, say, a bird trying
out a new location to feed or something.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and it's
just like two of the main factors here. So we'll
get into what this means here. So they also cite
an interesting 2002 study from Tillman et al., which found
that the use of effigies of dead vultures were highly
effective at keeping black vultures and turkey vultures away from airfields.
(13:49):
So this is a specific example of the whole, you know,
images of the dead or the actual dead. might make
the bird associate that with danger. Be like, that's a
place where buzzards go to die. That's not where I
want to go to.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
I wonder if it needs to specifically be the same
kind of bird that I am to scare me away.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
That's a good question. Yeah. I mean, I think that's
the way our minds often end up working. I was
reading a book titled In the Company of Crows and
Ravens by John M. Marsloff and Tony Angele. And they
mention the allegedly effective practice in the past of hanging
(14:29):
dead crows from the fence or some other structure to
keep their brethren away from, you know, like a crop,
because the idea is they would then associate the presence
of their own dead with danger. So I guess on
one level, we might match that up with the vulture
study here. But I have to stress, this also feels
a bit too much like the concept of human vengeance.
(14:51):
And human vengeance may often be feel like it's helping
and it may feel like it's emotionally solving a problem
while not actually solving a problem.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
That is the kind of thing I could imagine a
farmer of days gone by doing and thinking, yep, this
really works and whether it does or not. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
So I don't know, undecided on that because it does
seem like there is some study-based evidence that it works
with vultures at least. So who knows? Let's see. A
similar short term defectiveness seems to apply to predator stationary
effigies such as hawks. You know, this is where this
seems like it's also effective, but only in the short term.
(15:34):
Reading that some birds will mob owl effigies and knock
them over blackbirds and crows in particular. And this is
something in my own backyard. I have one of those
plastic owls overlooks our garden. And I'm always having to
pick it up. It's not positioned in a way that
I can ever observe what's happening. So it might just
be the wind. But I often think, oh, the birds
(15:54):
got it. The birds ambushed my poor plastic owl and
he's just laying useless on the ground.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
We've got a few plastic owls around the neighborhood. And
my daughter always thinks they're cute when we walk by.
And it just now occurred to me for the first
time that they might be scarecrows.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Well, it's one of those things like like scarecrows, like the.
the icon just becomes fun and separated from its usage.
I have a friend who has two of these in
his dining room. I know they're not keeping birds away
from any crops in there, but I think he just
ended up liking them or his kids liked them, so
they're just sitting in his living room. It's fine. Nice. Now,
(16:43):
I was also looking at a paper. This one is
frequently cited in articles covering scarecrow effectiveness. This is a
new wrinkle on an old method, successful use of scarecrows
as a non-lethal method to prevent bird damage to field
crops in Israel, 2006, by Nemtsov and Galili. And in
this one, basically what they found is that they would
(17:07):
put these yellow outfits on their scarecrows. After They've had
farmers wear yellow rain suits when they're conducting live bird
harassment activities or sometimes engaging in other activities. So there's
some sort of like active enforcement of the idea that
like yellow clothing, bright yellow clothing equals active human figures.
(17:31):
And then they're able to sort of enforce the effectiveness
of their scarecrows by doing this. Interesting. Okay.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
So they're getting to piggyback an extra association from the
fear lingering from like active discouragement by having that color there,
the color in common.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
It's almost like a form of advertising. Like you think
of like a complex advertising campaign. It's like you can
put the billboard out there. People are going to notice
it at first, but they're going to become blind to it.
You got to do other things. You need some radio spots.
You need some word of mouth. And in a way,
the yellow rain slicker idea here is kind of like
word of mouth. It's like, get the word out there.
(18:13):
Are you hearing about these scarecrows? They're really scary, man.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Well, it reminds me of those radio ads you used
to hear sometimes that would have traffic sounds in them,
like a blasting horn in the ad. You remember that?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Oh, vaguely. Yeah, I know this sort of thing. I
hate it when it even comes up in music or something.
It's like, come on, don't get anything alarming in there.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Yeah, but it gets your attention, doesn't it?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
It does, yeah. And yeah, I think that's a big
part of it because, you know, pretty much anywhere you look,
and this is something that Mancini drives some of that
mental flaws article as well, is that a stationary scarecrow
is just, it's only going to be effective in a
temporary fashion. Birds are going to learn, they're going to
adapt once they've figured out what the novel stimuli is
all about. And then there are just all these different
(18:55):
ways that people have jazzed it up. Mechanized movements, added lights,
the use of digital scarecrows with infrared eyes and supersonic
wave emitters. Apparently these are far more effective, but at
least speaking from the standpoint of Halloween and autumn decoration,
these don't really feel like scarecrows as much to me,
(19:17):
not in the traditional sense. It seems like we're getting
closer to the idea of robotic humanoid as opposed to
just scarecrow humanoid.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Isn't it funny that as a stimulus becomes more effective
at consistently scaring birds, it It becomes less scary to us.
It's less effective as a symbol for horror.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Like even just one that pops up and moves. That's
less scary than one just hanging there.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, it reminds me a little
bit of actually coming back to Halloween Haunted. attractions, you know,
haunted houses, if you will. Going through a really good one,
you're going to have a mix of different tactics. And
some of them are going to be very much some
sort of mechanical situation where it's just some sort of
a ghoul on sticks, essentially a scarecrow. And there's a timer,
(20:06):
there's some sort of hydraulic or some sort of mechanism
that just kind of launches it at you and then
draws it back. And that'll startle you for a second,
but then you laugh because it looks kind of stupid.
But a good haunted house is going to combine that
with live actors. And you might get like the one-two.
They love to do that, the misdirection of like, oh,
here's the fake mechanized thing. And then, oh Lord, here's
(20:28):
somebody in an actual costume. Yeah. So, yeah. So, again,
these sort of elements of deception are just widespread throughout
our culture.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
But can I posit something? So you go in the
haunted house and you get something that moves, bursts out
at you on a, you know, retractor rail or something.
And that's, oh, startled. Then you laugh. But the thing
you walk away thinking about that's in your nightmare later
was some static image from the haunted house.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Isn't it often? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're right.
And you certainly go through the haunted house with your
hackles raised. You're ready for things to jump out at you.
And then that wears off eventually after you leave the
haunted house. And it's the same with birds. After they
have stopped encountering the scarecrows, they're going to get used
(21:17):
to it. And then when they come back and the
scarecrows aren't doing anything different, you know, certainly if they're stationary,
they're going to get used to that as well. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
I guess on the human side, for the horror potency thing,
I think it's just like mysteriousness. Like an unmoving thing
is more mysterious. You wonder about it more.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Yeah, yeah. Now, the basic idea of just giving a
scarecrow some sort of movement, I mean, this in and
of itself goes back a long ways. You don't need
hydraulics or any kind of advanced technology to just make
a scarecrow move. If it's exposed to the wind and
you have the right construction... like that is going to
move it. You know, it might not easily enable some
(21:57):
of the lunging and launching movements found in some of
these studies, but it has historically allowed farmers in the U.S.
and Japan to do things like affix bells or other
noise-making implements to a decoy. I'm reminded, too, of basic,
you know, whirly gigs that have been used as bird deterrents,
moving and spinning when activated by the wind, connected in
(22:18):
principle to ancient wind power technologies for irrigation and and
wind detection, as well as just novelty toys. You know,
this idea that, oh yeah, the wind's blowing, you can
craft something that interacts with that wind.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
So to summarize and review on this, do scarecrows actually work?
The answer seems to be, it really depends. And so
your traditional non-moving scarecrow may work at first, but usually
most birds are going to get used to that over time.
Movement helps other different kinds of more exciting stimuli make
them more effective in most cases, but it's going to
(22:55):
depend on the type of bird, the thing you're trying
to keep the birds away from, and the bird's relationship
to that thing, and all of these intrinsic properties of
the scarecrow itself.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the more I think about it,
I think that this is all wrapped up, even at
like a subconscious level, in our fascination with the scarecrow,
because it does kind of represent this... idea that I'm
going to put a lot of work into something, or
at least a fair amount of work into something, and
then I'm going to solve my problems moving forward. And then,
you know, lo and behold, this kind of passive measure
(23:27):
isn't going to be effective very long. And it also
is kind of like an interesting, like, man and technology
versus nature scenario that reminds me of our recent Weird
House Cinema episode of Unknown Origin, the part where they're
talking about, like, man versus rat. You're thinking about the rat, what, 20%
of your day, maybe less. The rat's thinking about you 100%
(23:47):
of the day. And so the scarecrow is kind of
like this example of like, you chose to think about
the birds for a certain amount of your day, but
they are relentless. This is their, their all the time. Uh,
so eventually like they're just going to figure out what
you're doing unless you too are putting in the time
and finding ways to jazz up that scarecrow, uh, and
(24:08):
make it more effective. Hmm. Yeah. It's an active world
and passive measures are only going to be effective for
so long.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Well said. Well, Rob, are you ready to talk about
a sexual scarecrow?
Speaker 2 (24:31):
I trust you, so I will say yes.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
So one claim that I came across several times in
more general sources reading about the history of scarecrows was
the idea that in ancient Greek and Roman culture, the
functional role of the scarecrow was often played by representations
of a maybe surprising figure from the Pantheon, the god Priapus.
(25:02):
That name's probably ringing a bell with a lot of people.
Priapus is the Greco-Roman god associated with fertility, marriage, livestock,
gardens and fruits, and with male genitalia. In bodily form,
this is a male god depicted as having a huge,
often comically large erection. You can look up pictures for
(25:25):
yourself if you want to see them. Uh, uh, I've
got a few examples for you to look at here
in the outline, Rob. Uh, one thing I would say
is that of course there are lots of Roman depictions
of Priapus. Uh, you know, they were not shy about
depicting this God and they range from actually kind of
strangely solemn looking, which actually, which makes them funnier to
(25:47):
the ones that seem to be intentionally funny. So, uh,
I decided to look for references to this, uh, priapus
as scarecrow claim in credible academic works, and I found
that yes, indeed, it seems that if you brought up
the concept of a scarecrow to an ancient Greek or
(26:08):
Roman farmer, they might not think about a feed bag
stuffed with straw and a pumpkin head, but instead might
think first of a statue of a god with a
monstrous and holy phallus. So one good source I found
discussing this was a book called Birds in Roman Life
and Myth by a scholar named Ashley Green, who is
(26:31):
affiliated with the University of Melbourne in Australia. This book
was published by Taylor and Francis 2023. Uh, so the
book as a whole is focused on the significance of
birds in ancient Roman culture and covers a lot of stuff.
For example, uh, the role of birds in auspices, uh,
And things like attempts to attract songbirds to dedicated gardens
(26:54):
so that rich people could observe the songbirds for pleasure.
You know, cultivating bird gardens was apparently a thing for
the rich in ancient Rome. But there is specifically a
section entitled Pest Birds that gets directly into the subject
of these Praeapus scarecrows. So obviously, then and there, as
(27:15):
here and now, birds caused a lot of agricultural losses.
Green quotes a prayer to the goddess Ceres, the goddess
of agriculture and grain crops. And the prayer, I think
it's also a prayer to the earth figure, but to
Ceres and the earth. And the prayer says, forbid the birds,
pests of the tilled land, to devastate the fields of
(27:38):
corn with their destructive flocks. And note here, the reference
to corn would not be to maize crops, which we
often call corn today, but it would be the archaic
usage of corn, which generically meant like grains or seed crops. So,
you know, you could pray to Ceres, you could say,
please help protect my crops from birds, but sometimes you
(27:58):
need more than prayers. So Green writes, quote, Priapus also called,
I'm sorry if I pronounced this wrong, Mutinus Tutinus, is
an unmistakable Latin deity who promoted fertility and protected from
the evil eye. He also had the task of keeping
the household garden safe from its most common desecrators, namely
(28:23):
thieves and birds. So Green writes that to achieve this
protection from Priapus, the Roman farmer would put up a
wooden statue of the god in the garden, which had
a double function in It both worked as a shrine
to the God, so a kind of focal point for
(28:43):
worship of the God, and was physically functional as a scarecrow,
or at least was said to be. And I think
it's kind of fascinating to think about this. It's a
piece of religious technology. The statue of the God both
serves the religious purpose, it's representing the God to which
you direct your prayers for protection of your crops. And also,
(29:06):
by its very presence, the statue of the god is
at least a little bit literally efficacious at doing what
you're praying to the god for help with, like it
is scaring the birds. And it gets me thinking about
whether there are other examples of this, like religious objects
that in a physical mundane sense also do the thing
(29:27):
you're asking for the god's help with.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it basically gets
into this interesting scenario with an effigy. Like you can
raise an effigy with the pure intent of engaging in
bird scare, but that image is going to work on
us as well, and it's going to open, it's going
to engage with our own imagination and our certainly religious
(29:51):
and symbolic ideas. Like, you've You've committed an act here
that is going to resonate in the bird world and
the human world. And then how do we end up,
what do we end up doing with that?
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Yeah, that's a very good point. I almost feel like
we've gone backwards into this with scarecrows in more recent
literature where, you know, the scarecrow stuffed with straw out
in the field, you know, to the 19th century farmer
is probably not supposed to be a religious object of
any kind. It's just functional, but it keeps kind of
getting magic attached to it in all of our storytelling,
(30:22):
doesn't it?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Yeah, yeah. And just thinking about other decorations, thinking like
people just keep raising larger and larger skeletons in their
front yard, you know, for decorative purposes, for Halloween fun. But,
you know, at what point does it just become an
idol of the god of death at some point? You know,
not again, not in an intentional overt way, but like
(30:45):
in some like deeply resonating way concerning the way that
we engage with imagery.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Totally. So in this passage from the book, Green quotes
some texts, quotes some Roman literature and liturgy, filling in
texture on how people thought about Priapus' role in the garden.
So one of these quotes is, To the fruit-laden gardens
is given red Priapus as watch to scare the birds
(31:14):
with cruel billhook. Uh, and a note there, it describes
Priapus as red. What's going on with that? Uh, well,
I looked this up and it seems that statues of
Priapus were often painted red. Uh, and the God was
sometimes given epithets like the red or the crimson one.
It seems to have something to do with themes of
ripe fruit, but also maybe like, uh, potency and virility
(31:38):
and engorgement.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Uh, engorge with blood. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
And then, uh, in fact, the, uh, the next quote
in the book uses a similar epithet. It is, quote,
the crimson one who by his lewd image scares the
timid birds. So I really like that idea. It's like,
because he's a lewd, rude, crude dude that the birds
are scared.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. Sure.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
Another one of these is Crimson Priapus, Glory and Guard
of Gardens. So to picture the standard Priapus scarecrow in
a rustic Roman garden, I think you should imagine a
wooden statue of a man with a possibly huge erect
penis painted blood red all over and then holding a
(32:26):
curved blade like a sickle or a billhook, sometimes decked
in garlands of produce from the most recent successful harvest,
but not necessarily always. Sounds kind of frightening and grotesque,
but Green writes that, quote, Priapus with his fearsome crotch
was dearly beloved by many Roman families. And Green mentions
(32:48):
the Priapia, which is a collection of these 80 anonymous
poems about this god from around the first century CE.
The Priapia describes this type of scarecrow as a protector
of the poor farmer. It seems kind of associated not
with rich farmers who own many, many lands and many fields,
(33:10):
but with the poor subsistence farmer or the rustic farmer
out in the country. So a friend and protector of
the poor farmer and a threat to thieves who would
come and take away his livelihood and his home. And
the passage also cites one of the satires of the
(33:30):
first century BCE Roman poet Horace, which is about a
wooden priapus statue. And the satire reads in translation, of course,
as follows, quote, Once I was a figwood stem, a
worthless log, when the carpenter, doubtful whether to make a
stool or a priapus, chose that I be a god.
(33:50):
A god then I became. A god then I became
of thieves and birds, the special terror. For thieves, my
right hand keeps in check. And this red stake protruding
from unsightly groin. While for the mischievous birds, a harundo
sat on my head, affrights them and keeps them from
lighting in the new garden. So I had to look
(34:14):
up what this harundo was. What does that mean? In
the general sense, it seems it's a Latin term meaning shaft,
which can have multiple applications. Could be the shaft of
an arrow or a fishing rod or like a reed.
In this context, though, Green explains that the harundo coming
off of Priapus' head is a limed reed. And I'm
(34:36):
not positive what that means, but I think that means
a reed coated in what was called bird lime at
the time. I think we've talked about this on the
show before. Bird lime was a kind of sticky, gluey
substance that you might smear on tree limbs or other
tools to intentionally trap small birds.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
So.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
At least according to Horus, the Priapus scares away human
thieves with its hooked blade and with the big erection,
and it scares away birds with a bird-trapping device, which
is also basically phallic in nature, attached to its head.
Green expresses doubts about whether the image of the Harundo
(35:18):
was actually any more frightening to birds than just a
regular statue. Like, I guess that is worth wondering about, like,
Do the birds know what a limed reed is when
they see it? Is that especially scary to them?
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah. Does it have dead birds affixed to it at
this point? Because if that's the case, that might play
into some of what we were talking about already. But
if there are no dead birds attached to it, then, well,
it comes down to how is the bird processing this image?
Speaker 3 (35:45):
That's a good point. If there are dead birds stuck
to it, that, I mean, that doesn't come up in
the source, but I wonder if that's just one of
those unspoken things that was part of the reality and
doesn't get mentioned in our, in our literature.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Open question.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Uh, but so, uh, anyway, this author green thinks that
the horrendous bird repelling properties might've been more magical or
symbolic than, than literally efficacious, but that would be an
interesting experiment to run. Like, I wonder if, Something like
that could actually have a repelling property, maybe in an
environment where there's a lot of trapping with bird lime
(36:20):
taking place.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
I don't know. Yeah. Something like that that's, again, enforcing
the image, right? Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
But anyway, how effective were these scarecrows? You know, we
ask how effective are scarecrows in general? It depends on
a lot of things. How effective did ancient people think
the Priapus scarecrow was to protect their gardens? Well, again,
Green quotes that poem series, the Priapia. This line reads, quote,
And often by shouting have we driven away the old
(36:52):
raven and enthusiastic jackdaw who would with horny beak peck
your sacred head.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Well, there you go.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
So we got to defend the Priapus from the birds
that it's supposed to be keeping away.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah, so that makes it sound like they're effective as
they've always been. Yes.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
So despite some fearsome elements, birds can become rather accustomed
to the Priapus scarecrow, and they have to be driven
away from the shrine by human intervention. The Roman poet
Virgil advises farmers to use more active measures. Virgil says,
scare birds away with noise. And this can be screaming
(37:29):
at them, shouting, or using noise-making devices like rattles. Rich
Roman farmers could, of course, have people just work as
live bird skimmers in the fields. And this might mean
visual appearances or making noise, or it could even include
active use of the sling in the fields. But on
(37:50):
poor family farms, if anybody was going to be keeping
birds out of the gardens, it would probably be children.
Or you might just have to prey and depend on
prey apis and hope for the best. But for a
final bit of perspective, I thought this was pretty interesting.
Green is talking about, you know, Romans making these appeals
(38:12):
to the god Priapus to protect their gardens, to keep
their gardens safe from the birds. And then the author writes, quote,
There was a firm distinction drawn between delightful songbirds, welcome
in ornamental gardens, and pest birds, unwelcome in the fields
and gardens where families grew food. The act of appreciating
(38:34):
wild birds and taking pleasure from their appearance on one's
land was not something everyone could afford. Hence the elite
preoccupation with pleasure gardens. So I thought that was really
interesting as a principle that I think is still true
in many ways today that like wealth can alter the
meaning of nature for you. And so like in this
(38:55):
ancient Roman context, Your level of wealth and your labor
relationship to agricultural production totally changes the meaning of birds
for you.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Yeah, that's a great point. And I guess for many
of us, we kind of end up, especially as hobbyist gardeners,
we end up with kind of a foot in both worlds.
We don't depend on that garden in the backyard. We
don't want it eaten up by birds, so we do
things like buy a plastic owl plant. But at the
same time, on the other side of the yard, like
(39:26):
maybe in the front yard, we've got bird feeders up.
We've got hummingbird feeders up. And we're engaging in the
other end. We're having our own little pleasure garden. So
it's kind of interesting how we end up being situated
between the two. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Trying to find a balance.
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Yeah. Some birds welcome. Other birds, please don't. We're only
in the front yard, please. Do they obey? Um, my,
my birds. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I don't know.
We have such mixed use. I'm such an, such an
amateur when it comes to gardening. I really can't even
answer that. Something eats some, I think, I feel like our,
(40:02):
our own little backyard garden is, is more ravaged by, um, uh,
insects than anything though.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
That's my, my understanding.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Scarecrows don't work on insects.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
They don't, they don't. You gotta, well, they're too big.
You gotta make them real tiny. Right.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Um, Has anybody ever tried if you just throw a
bunch of those little plastic spider rings all over your garden?
Does that keep insects away?
Speaker 2 (40:24):
I don't know. I did not run across studies on
this particular topic, but it's possible somebody's looked into it.
I guess it comes down to a question of what
senses are you engaging in? And mostly with scarecrows, we're
talking about engaging the visual system.
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Of the birds. Which have long line of sight.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
And then if we're engaging in these other things like noise,
we're engaging in sound as well. But with insects, you know,
maybe it comes more down to other senses. Not sure.
All right. We have one more scarecrow deity to discuss here.
(41:07):
And in this, we're going to get into Japanese culture
a bit. So Japanese traditional agriculture made use of scarecrows
in the form of which are indeed much like the
Western notion of the scarecrow, or at least they come
to be that, an anthropomorphic form to keep birds and
other beasts away from the crop, though with interesting connections
(41:30):
to odor-based techniques toward spirits away. And this remains at
least part of the wordage anyway. And I do want
to note here, this is again an area where we see,
you can imagine the scarecrow is a, An effigy with
a foot in both worlds, in the world of human agriculture,
(41:52):
but also in the world of human mysticism and religion
and supernatural concepts. Because you have other traditions, I was
running across some others as well, where you have something
like a scarecrow that has purely supernatural purpose. It's used
to keep spirits away. And so it's something to keep
(42:12):
in mind in all of this as well.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
So apparently kakashi is thought to be derived from the
word kagashi. Kagashi means sniffing. This according to a 2025
paper by Meiko Shogatsudani. I had to run this title
through Google Translate, but I believe the title is The
Scent of Warding Off Misfortune and Inviting Good Fortune, a
Case Study of the Custom of Making Someone Smell. I
(42:38):
did not attempt to run the full paper through translation
because I I figured it would end up getting some
things vitally wrong. But it does include an English language abstract,
and that's mainly what I was working off up here
with this one paper. The author mentions that the exact
sniffing-related practice is often lost in these things. It seems
(42:58):
that the older use of Kakashi was more based on
posting foul-smelling substances like rotting fish to ward off pests,
and that the practice remained when the switch to more
anthropomorphic scarecrows became more common. And this would have occurred,
to be clear, long before contact with Europeans or anything
like that. But then the smell aspect of the thing
(43:19):
eventually vanishes from usage as well. Interesting.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
So you say it begins probably with repellent odors and
then over time shifts to being visual, like anthropomorphic repellent.
Speaker 2 (43:30):
Yeah, that's my understanding. Or perhaps it's something along the
lines of like the word is associated with the odor-based repellents.
And you have visual-based repellents going on as well, but
then everything ends up being referred to by the same term,
and then the smell aspect of the thing kind of
goes away.
Speaker 3 (43:45):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
Yeah. In the modern usage, it can be rather distant
from agricultural usage altogether. One famous example of this, and
listeners and viewers, you may have seen this on travel shows,
such as James May's Our Man in Japan, which I
watched several years ago and really enjoyed, in that he
visits this particular town. remote town of Nagoro in Shikoku.
(44:11):
And this is a rural community that has been greatly
depopulated in modern times. People, you know, certainly people, older
people dying, but then younger people moving off, often to
large urban areas. And the locals have taken to replacing
locals who have left or died with Kakashi dolls, making
(44:33):
it the Scarecrow Village or Kakashi no Sato. So more than,
and the paper, the articles I was reading about this
are at this point, I think several years old, but
like by 2020 standards, a lot of these were saying
there were like 300 of these to be found in
the town. And they appear, they're situated in little tableaus,
(44:54):
like they're doing farm work or local chores or having
a community meeting, that sort of thing. And the understanding too,
is that there are more scarecrows than humans in this
town at this point. Yeah, so the village has received
a lot of attention as like a commentary on the
trend of depopulation of remote villages for larger cities in Japan,
(45:15):
as well as kind of a way to illustrate and
maybe even a form of protest, but certainly to illustrate
this tension, this sense of loss felt regarding rural and
urban spaces, certainly in the Japanese mindset.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
That's really interesting. Do you ever read on whether these
effigies are primarily like aimed at the people who made them?
Did they make them for themselves? Like, was it an
act of comfort or something like that? Or more as
like an outward facing kind of work of art? Or
like you said, like maybe a protest, like a form
of statement?
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Well, I kind of get the impression that it ends
up serving both of these functions to some degree, but
I think is maybe more inward based at first. And then,
you know, then people from beyond the town began to
take notice and, you know, media visits and, you And
they're very inviting. I think when James May visited, they
ended up making a cacacea of him as well. So
(46:10):
he was added to the mix. So, you know, there's
a certain amount of, there's a seriousness to it, but
there also seems to be a certain amount of fun
to it and a certain amount of whimsy. But I
think ultimately it's illustrating a rather complex scenario that does
have its, you know, a sense of sadness to it
as well. And then coming to the idea of a god,
(46:30):
there is a Shinto deity in the mix in the
form of Kubiko. So one mention of this figure I
found in, I believe this is a 1926 work, A
Study of Shinto, the Religion of the Japanese Nation by
Genshi Keito. And the author writes of this and says,
and this is in translation, of course, Yamada no Sohato,
(46:54):
otherwise called Kubiko or the Crumbling Prince. which is nothing
but a scarecrow set up in rice fields to ward
off predatory birds, is a great fetish god who, quote,
knows anything and everything under the sun, even though it
is always kept standing still.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
Oh, that's an interesting duality. So if I read that right,
there's a kind of irony in this god in that
it is presented as maybe omniscient, but not especially potent
or completely impotent?
Speaker 2 (47:21):
I think that might be the case, but I think
there's also a sense of like, like studious dedication to
one's study and the idea that it's like, you know,
all you're doing is studying. You're not interacting with the world.
And in the stillness, you're accumulating knowledge and maybe becoming
more in line with divine knowledge.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
Okay, so maybe shouldn't be read as lack of ability
to act in the world, but that the standing still
is like a way of learning, sort of?
Speaker 2 (47:49):
I think so. But my first impression was very much
the same, thinking of like, oh, the scarecrow's just setting
up there It's not doing anything to actively ward off birds,
but is constantly observing, constantly taking in information. So, yeah, ultimately,
it's like a god of wisdom and agriculture. And as
(48:09):
I understand, still revered at certain shrines. There'll be certain
Shinto shrines that you'll find in Japan that are dedicated
to this particular deity. And I read more about it,
like the really sort of the origin of this deity
and certainly the... the high point of its popularity in
Denizens of the Unseen World, Gods, Spirits, Immortals by Anne Lothal.
(48:33):
This was, um, published in 2025, uh, as a chapter
in the book, In the Presence of Gods and Spirits,
Hirata Atsutani and His Collaborators. Uh, this refers to the
scholar and an important 19th century Shinto theologian, Hirata Atsutani,
who lived 1776 through 1843. And, um, So the author here,
(48:57):
she describes this entity, again, coming back to the god Kubiko,
as a minor 19th century god who then rises to
prominence specifically in 1869 when he's invoked, basically sort of
the mascot, if you will, in a more deeply set
(49:17):
religious manner, at the opening of a new national university.
And in Japan, this is a consolidation of historic Edo
period shogunal schools under the newly restored imperial rule. But
then his veneration quickly falls away again into relative obscurity,
just like a year later, because that school ends up
(49:39):
closing due to just chaotic infighting. They tried to take
these three centers of learning, cobble them into one, and
make them confirm to some different ideas about the nature
of education and scholarly pursuit. And I think the key here,
if I'm understanding correctly, and this is not an area
that I've done a lot of reading about, but I
think the idea is that this effort was also charged
(50:01):
with a sense of let's remove foreign ideas from education.
We don't want Confucius to be a part of this
because he is not purely Japanese. He's of Chinese origin.
We don't want the Buddha to be a part of this.
We want it to be more based in Shinto and
things off Japan. So she describes that the idea of
Kobiko is apparently based in part on much older rural
(50:25):
Japanese practices involving very agricultural scarecrows dressed as gods of
the rice paddy. combined with this idea of a medium
that could be imbued with divine knowledge. It would kind
of absorb and become a center of knowledge, divine knowledge.
And again, this concept was, I think, largely developed and
(50:49):
pushed forward by Shinto theologian Hirata Atsutani, who took it
as one of his personal deities and taught its veneration
to his students and Again, in large part as a
sort of a nationalist alternative to the veneration of foreign
Confucius or even Buddhist figures to align with the priorities
of the emperor after the Meiji Restoration. And this is
(51:13):
why it was chosen to represent learning at this school.
And then that's also why it ends up falling away.
So the closing of the Deities Associated School in 1870
takes away its base of veneration. But Atsutani apparently held
on to the concept and saw it as an ideal
one could sort of merge with personally. And again, the
(51:34):
entity does seem to live on as one of the
more obscure Shinto deities.
Speaker 3 (51:39):
And does the god still have these associations of like
wisdom or great sort of observation and learning about the world?
Speaker 2 (51:45):
I think so. I was looking at some images of
the shrines. And the shrines, I think to someone who
didn't know what they were looking at, you wouldn't think
it had anything to do with scarecrows. So I don't
know if the deity rather ends up kind of like
losing its scarecrow qualities as well in its, again, kind
(52:06):
of obscure form today. But it certainly was associated with
the scarecrow in its original conception.
Speaker 3 (52:14):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
Yeah. So there's a lot more to it than I thought.
I thought it was going to be more versed in
like full-fledged folk tradition. And it does have roots there,
but it also seems to be a product of You know,
more like sort of deeper Shinto theology and then also
essentially like political reorganization that was going on at the time.
Speaker 3 (52:37):
Do you know anything about the connotations of this other
name Kubiko has that the crumbling prince? It makes me
think of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story we read in part
one where the scarecrow is repeatedly described in terms of
like the old and tattered quality of the things that
make it up.
Speaker 2 (52:55):
Yeah, I think that is the case. I think it
does have to do with what a scarecrow looks like.
You know, that you can dress one up to look like,
you know, a god of the rice paddy or some
sort of a prince or something. But at the end
of the day, it's a scarecrow. It's going to be
out in the sun in the elements. Birds are going
to mess with it. It's going to get rained on
and so forth. The wind's going to blow on it
(53:17):
and it's going to degrade somewhat.
Speaker 3 (53:19):
And it's probably made out of stuff you were trying
to get rid of anyway.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
Old trash. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (53:24):
Also ironic in a way that you could have the
scarecrow as this image of wisdom and learning in this
one cultural context. Because he, in so many other stories
like these, you know, American or European stories we've been
talking about, the scarecrow is often the image of emptiness.
I think about, you know, the scarecrow in The Wizard
(53:46):
of Oz who lacks a brain, the scarecrow in the
Hawthorne story, which is totally symbolic of emptiness and insubstantiality.
Speaker 2 (53:54):
Well, maybe there's a sense of humility to it. I'm
a humble scholar. I'm like the scarecrow. I'm out here
exposed to the elements. I may not be chasing down birds,
but I'm actively absorbing information and becoming more in line with, again,
divine knowledge.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
There's almost a sense of mischief in that, in that
the scarecrow is a thing that is manufactured by the
farmer in order to be seen and not to see.
But then if you think about it from the scarecrow's perspective,
what has it to do but see, but to observe?
Speaker 1 (54:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
And then, as we've been saying, the scarecrow is swiftly
not seen anymore. Yeah. By birds, certainly, but also by people.
It just becomes a part of the landscape. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 3 (54:36):
Does that do it for part two?
Speaker 2 (54:38):
I think so. Yeah. Yeah. We touched on a number
of ideas I think we'll come back to in subsequent episodes.
So stick with us on that. But if you have
questions that roll in in the meantime, go ahead and
launch them our way. If you have field reports, like
sometimes literal field reports because we're talking about scarecrows, do
send those in because we would love to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (54:59):
Yeah, we will definitely be reading some scarecrow mail in
our first listener mail episode after October. So please send
it on in. Contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
Speaker 2 (55:09):
All right. As always, we just remind you that Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture
podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes
on Wednesdays, and on Fridays, we set aside most serious
concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema. Wherever you get the show, we just ask
that you rate, review, subscribe. If you're watching on Netflix,
that's where the video version is, give us a couple
(55:30):
of thumbs up and ask to be reminded about new episodes.
Speaker 3 (55:33):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J.
Speaker 2 (55:36):
Posway.
Speaker 3 (55:37):
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
Thank you.
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