“They are like huge flowers, with wings! nearly three feet tall, with a long wingspan of more than four feet 1.2 m. skinny red legs, bright pink wings, and long white necks. no feathers on their greenish heads, and their eyes are a glowing red.”
From: Roseate Spoonbill: Pretty In Pink. by Stephen Person, 2013.
This is a photo of Plumeria, a genus of eleven species of shrubs and small trees in the dogbane family (Apocynaceae) native to tropical America from Brazil to Mexico and the Caribbean. The image is one I copied from a free source on the web. Why is the photo in this blog entry? When I was searching for information about spoonbills, I stumbled upon this article: Plumerias the Color of Roseate Spoonbills’ - Continuity and transition in the symbolism of Plumeria L. in Mesoamerica. Thomas J. Zumbroich. Ethnobotany Research & Applications 11: 341-363 (2013). From the abstract: “This study explores the complex symbolism which the genus Plumeria L. engendered from around the beginning of the common era to the present time in Mesoamerica. In much of this cultural area an intense interest in sensory pleasures can be traced to great antiquity, and, consequently, flowers became a central metaphor in the Mesoamerican cosmological discourse. In the Maya pantheon, plumeria was associated with deities representing life force and fertility and therefore plumeria flowers became strongly connected with a wide range of expressions of female sexuality. Among Nahuatl speaking people of central Mexico, especially during the height of the Aztec empire, the most prominent association of plumeria was to signify élite status, with plumeria trees planted in the gardens of the nobility, the blooms ex-changed at feasts, or the stylized image of plumeria flowers inscribed on ceramics and codices. In the context of the hybridized religious systems that developed in response to the introduction of Christianity across Mesoamerica, plumerias developed new meanings, e.g., as elaborate decorations for the worship of the Virgin Mary. When in the sixteenth century plumeria was dispersed beyond the Americas into Southeast Asia, likely through Spanish hands and by way of the Philippines, it gained a wide- spread association with graveyards as a plant promoting contact with the deceased.”
On page 348 I found the link to the spoonbill.
“In the 1570’s Francisco Hernández, court physician to King Philip II of Spain, set out on a scientific expedition to the Valley of Mexico with the objective of compiling a ‘Pliny of the New World’, and in the resulting monumental work more details about cacaloxochitl emerged. Hernández, too, recognized the wide range of different ‘raven flower’ plants that came in named varieties which only differed in the colors of their flowers, from crimson (tlapalticacaloxochitl, tlapaltic, ‘deep red’ (Sahagún 1950-1982:(7)) to white (iztaccacaloxochitl, iztac, ‘white’ (Molina 1571:f49r). In fact, there were so many that Hernández would not dare mention them all, so as not to bore the reader (Hernández 1615:45r-45v, Varey 2000:125-126). One particularly interesting plumeria variety received a separate entry: tlauhquecholtic was named for its similarity to the roseate spoonbill (Platalea ajaja L., 1758), an attractive wading bird with coloring from white through pink to magenta on its body).”
