What is the bird Rukh, Europeans learned after meeting with the fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights." When this happened - it's hard to say. Perhaps after a long eastern voyage by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, or maybe a little earlier or later. The magical world of fairy tales that absorbed the millennial folklore of the eastern peoples captivated the Europeans.
According to some researchers, not only unknown storytellers, but also very specific ancient writers of Persia, India and Arab countries had a hand in creating this fairy-tale cycle. Be that as it may, the Europeans appreciated the fabulous exotic world of the East, in which the magic bird Rukh took its rightful place.
In Europe there were no fairy tales in which a giant bird would appear, therefore Arab legends, in which people fight this winged monster, passed, as they say, “with a bang”. Later, historians, biologists and writers of the Old World began to wonder: why did it happen that in Europe there is no information about huge birds, but in Arabian traditions there are more than a lot of them. They began to look for where the fabulous bird Rukh could be found, or at least its prototype.
Europeans met ostriches a long time ago, but they were liquid in order to arouse a twist of magical inspiration among fairy tale writers. When the researchers tried to analyze the legends regarding the meeting of travelers with a bird, it turned out that almost all surprisingly unanimously point to the island of Madagascar.
But by the time Europeans appeared on the island in the seventeenth century, they had not found anything like it. For some time, the opinion that information about a giant bird is nothing more than a poetic exaggeration, and possibly fiction from beginning to end, has been established in science and society.
But very soon, researchers of the fauna of Madagascar discovered that there were indeed giant flightless birds on the island, and they were destroyed after the Europeans met the island. Possibly, numerous European pirates also had a hand in the extermination, who even founded their own state in Madagascar for a long time, and only after the pirates became impudent beyond measure destroyed by French troops. Pirates did not keep annals, did not publish newspapers, and their stories about hunting for a giant bird could well be regarded by contemporaries as traditional sea tales.
According to modern estimates, the bird Rukh of Arabian tales (or epiornis according to the name adopted today) reached a height of five meters. The growth is more than solid, but by no means sufficient to call her the name "elephant bird", under which Rukh appears in some Arabic sources.
According to the Arabs, Rukh ate elephants and could lift into the air, according to various sources, from one to three of these huge animals. And the flight of the bird Rukh created a lot of inconvenience for the sailors: it covered the sun with its wings and created such a strong wind that it supposedly even drowned the ships.
Of course, no five-meter epiornis could have done such ugliness, even if he really wanted to. Apparently, the Arabs, having become acquainted with the epiornis, mistook him for a chick, and his mother, according to their ideas, should have been much larger and certainly should be able to fly. And such a giant should also eat giants, hence the tales of elephants raised in the air.
The ancient Arabs had no idea of ecological balance, nor of aerodynamics. Otherwise, they would know that a bird of the sizes indicated by them in the conditions of the planet Earth cannot fly in principle. And to maintain the number of birds of the Rukh, sufficient for the normal reproduction of the population, no elephants will be enough.
