Birds as Companion Animals in Traditional Polynesian Narratives

Abstract

In all traditional Polynesian societies, people developed a deep knowledge of all feathered creatures, and devised a great many stories about them. This paper offers a summary and a comparative study of seventeen traditional narratives from throughout Polynesia that feature birds as the companions of the human, divine, or semidivine protagonists of the stories. These oral traditions, which were put in writing in the 19th and 20th centuries by Westerners, show that, in traditional Polynesian societies, people perceived birds as much more than a food source: They were deeply attached to the feathered creatures that they kept as companion animals.