snake or frigate bird

[josh stout]

Thanks Nick, that is the sort of thing I was thinking of, but the spectacled cobra and the monocled cobra are not quite the same as what is on the stick, they just make me think that there may be a cobra with the right pattern. I also wonder what the pattern would look like when the hood is down. Perhaps it would be more like the stick pattern.

I have heard many stories of native peoples who cannot identify a bird from picture, or in some cases even dead, but they can recognize it high in the trees from the rustle. I suspect that many times animals are difficult for us to ID from ethnographc depictions because what is emphasized is different from what we see in pictures. For example, there may not have been enough wood for the hood of a cobra, so the carver put the cobra mark on, but depicted the mark as it would be when the hood is down. Something obvious to any local can be mystifying to us.
Josh