In 1954, musicologists heard the sound of a couple people playing a beautiful guitar duet. When they rounded the corner they were surprised to find not a duet but one man, sitting on a pile of bricks, playing guitar to entertain his fellow masons working on a brick wall. This man was Joseph Spence (one of my favourites and a very influential guitarist—please look up his music). What they didn’t find was the 3 foot tall, flightless owls which populated Andros Island, where Spence was from, until Europeans and Americans colonized the Bahamas and deforested the pines where these owls lived and fed and bred. Unlike other other large, Island-bound, flightless birds who were eaten into extinction like the Dodo, these owls were revered by the locals and even gave rise to the legend of Chicharnee; an owl-like forest gnome who granted good luck if you treated him with respect and left him offerings.
