In Greek myth, the Stymphalian birds appear in tales of Heracles and in the Argonautica, the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts. The Goddess Hera commissions war god Ares to create the Stymphalian birds to kill Heracles.
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Hera hates Heracles because he forever reminds her of Zeus' infidelity. He's a descendent of Io, a mortal woman of high birth, and Zeus in the form of a cloud. Hera turns Io into a cow. This famous act leads to an origin tale of the Bosporus Strait.
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Ares creates the birds for Hera. They're driven away from their initial nesting site by wolves, and come to inhabit the Stymphalian marshes of Arcadia. Their feathers are honed copper and bronze. They shoot them like arrows at enemies.
Known as voracious maneaters, they have deadly sharp bronze beaks. Their dung is poisonous and they wreak mass destruction. The sixth labor of Heracles is to get rid the Stymphalian birds. When he arrives the birds are reluctant to fly from their nests.
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The beak of a cormorant has a strong hook at the end to snag fish from crevices. Reluctance to fly is a cormorant trait as their wings are small relative to body weight, so flying takes extra energy.
They make this sacrifice for incredible agility under water. Heracles makes noise to frighten them into the sky, where he shoots them. In myth the surviving birds fly to the isle of Ares, or Aretias, in the Black Sea.
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In reality they'd be different flocks of cormorants as the sea is salt and Arcadian wetlands are fresh. The Great Cormorant species can live in both. The isle of Ares is identified with Giresun Island on the Black Sea coast of Turkey.
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It's also called Amazon Island as the legendary warrior women build a temple there. In the story of Jason and the Argonauts, a blind prophet tells Jason:
" .... ye must beach your ship upon a smooth island, when ye have driven away with all manner of skill the ravening birds, which in countless numbers haunt the desert island. In it the Queens of the Amazons, Otrere and Antiope, built a stone temple of Ares ... "
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For a long time, this island has been a breeding ground of cormorants and gulls. Early Greek sailors might view the birds with suspicion. Their wing-spread stance seems aggressive. They eat all the fish in the sea. Cormorants are voracious feeders.
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Cormorants are designed for gluttony, stuffing extra food in their flexible neck pouches. They're a distant relative of pelicans. Their chick are ravenous too. They eat all they can to get them through lean times.
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Nearing the island shores in breeding season might arouse hostility and loud bleats from the birds. As the myth says, the dung of the birds is toxic. Cormorant dung has a high acidity level.
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Since the birds use the same nests every year, the ground beneath the nesting sites soon becomes barren of life. Usually they nest on cliffs, rocky coastlines and islands. In woodland wetland areas they nest in colonies in tall trees.
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Mythic creatures and beasts develop from real ones and imaginative interpretations over the years. So, it's possible the cormorants of Arcadia and the Black Sea are the inspiration for Greek Stymphalian birds. Great Cormorants still nest on Amazon Island.
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