Did the Aztecs introduce a new bird to Mexico City?
Alternate title: The Emperor's New Grackle
In her spectacular recent book Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, historian Camilla Townsend imagines what it must have been like for a troupe of musicians to visit the Aztec Empire capital of Tenochtitlan near the height of the Empire’s power. The city, located where modern-day Mexico City now stands, was built on a massive man-made island in the middle of a lake and housed between 200,000 and 400,000 inhabitants, making it one of the largest cities in the world. She imagines the musicians gazing in awe at its gleaming pyramids, its massive palaces, its diverse foods, its sprawling gardens, and its extraordinary system of aquatic farms and aqueducts that kept it all running. This was a new kind of city in Mexico. Nothing that anyone had seen compared to the sight of Tenochtitlan.
But within this great man-made city, Townsend writes, one of the most impressive sights would have been the birds.
In large, finely wrought wooden cages, the brightest birds from the jungles in the east and south fluttered and sang — quetzal birds and parrots, flamingos and tufted ducks, parakeets and pheasants — too many kinds to count. As the birds flew quickly in and out of the foliage, the colors of their wings glinted in the evening light, like flashes of magic, the result of some spell, just like in the stories.
This image does not jive with how most modern people talk about the Aztecs. To many, they were a brutal civilization, whose jaguar warriors tore out their enemies’ hearts and whose priests practiced human sacrifice. Such a depiction, however, obscures a diverse, complex society with a rich culture — heroic princesses, brilliant engineers, shrewd diplomats, gay emperors, poets and philosophers who rivalled any in Europe, and a rich spiritual tradition beyond human sacrifice.
They also really, really loved birds. The Aztecs worshipped gods like Huitzilopochtli, symbolized by a hummingbird. They hunted pelicans, herons, ducks and other waterbirds for food. They used feathers to decorate clothes, shields, and jewelery. The imperial dynasty maintained an extensive zoo filled with macaws, cotingas, spoonbills, raptors, and other rare birds.
Birds are even key to the founding of Tenochtitlan. According to their tradition, the Mexica (one of the three founding cultures of the Triple Alliance, also known as the Aztec Empire) were told by their god Huitzilopochtli to found a city where they saw “an eagle with a snake in its beak perched atop a prickly pear.” When the Mexica witnessed exactly this sign while hiding on a marshy island in Lake Texcoco, they decided to found their capital city there.
And alongside their reverence, there is evidence to suggest the Aztecs might have introduced an entirely new species of bird to their homeland.
In the aftermath of European colonization, Aztec and Spanish historians began compiling histories of the Aztec Empire. The most famous of these histories is the so-called Florentine Codex, compiled by Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún between 1545 and 1590. The codex is made up of 12 books that cover everything from Aztec gods and religion to mercantile practices to ethics and philosophy.
Book 11 covers natural history. In this book, Sahagún compiles a species-by-species account of the important animals within Aztec culture in incredible specificity and detail, to the point where it includes two different species of grackles. One is referred to as the tzanatl. It was black with a curved beak, about the size of a thrush, caused great damage to the maize harvest, and was “not good to eat.” This likely referred to the slender-billed grackle, a now-extinct species native to the valley of Mexico. Based on the tone of the description, it seems unlikely that the Aztecs would have mourned their passing.
It’s the other grackle that gets more attention in the codex: the teotzanatl, which we call the great-tailed grackle. It is described in much more flattering terms — the male has “a very fine black color” and a “long, chiseled tail; it is a good singer.” Fittingly, the name teotzanatl means “precious grackle,” which they got because they are not originally found in the Valley of Mexico — “they came to these parts not too many years ago, when Ahuitzotl was lord.”
Ahuitzotl was the eighth emperor of the Triple Alliance, ruling from 1486 to 1502, shortly before colonization. He is perhaps best known for his wars with groups like the Mixtec and Zapotec on the Pacific coast that extended Triple Alliance power as far south as modern-day Guatemala. He also appeared to have a particular fondness for the great-tailed grackle. These grackles were originally only found in the coastal lowlands, but according to the codex, the teotzanatl “came to these regions of Mexico by his [Ahuitzotl’s] order,” imported from the provinces of Cuextlan and Totonacapan on the Gulf coast.
The practice of importing exotic birds might seem like a strangely modern idea, but the Aztecs had a lot of captive birds in their zoos and gardens. Nearly all of these birds were transported to Tenochtitlan from the tropical lowlands, which had far more avian biodiversity than the Mexican highlands, particularly among colorful birds. Some of these birds were imported by long-distance merchants called pochteca, while others were given to the city as a form of tax by conquered provinces.
Some were even poached. The Triple Alliance were home to an elite crew of pochteca that snuck into the territory of unconquered peoples to steal rare goods, including birds. In the Florentine Codex, Sahagún describes how these pochteca would cut their hair, adopt a new dress, and learn a new language to go undercover beyond Aztec borders, where they faced death if they were caught. They had special techniques to capture birds, too. Sahagún describes how pochteca captured blue cotingas, whose colors were so rich and feathers so delicate that the pochtecas risked breaking the feathers and staining the plumage if they simply grabbed them, by “grasp[ing] a handful of green grass; with it they seized the bird.”
Regardless of how the great-tailed grackles were originally captured, they were soon brought several hundred miles inland and upslope to Tenochtitlan, where Ahuitzotl ordered for them to be released. Then, the residents of the city were instructed to feed them and do them no harm. According to the codex, “if anyone stoned them, they chided one another; the common folk said to one another, ‘’What are you doing over there? Do not shout at, do not stone the lord’s birds!”
Soon, the teotzanatls spread beyond Ahuitzotl’s control. “When they multiplied, they scattered, they traveled everywhere, they ate everywhere,” the Codex reads. These grackles established themselves throughout Tenochtitlan and the surrounding countryside. When the Spanish came and christened the old capital as Mexico City, the grackles remained. The great-tailed grackles that live in Mexico City today are very likely the descendants of those individuals introduced by Ahuitzotl 600 years ago.
The idea that Ahuitzotl was responsible for establishing the modern population of great-tailed grackles in Mexico City was first proposed by UC Santa Barbara biologist Paul Haemig in 1978. His paper was controversial for all the reasons you expect — us Westerners have been fed the idea that Indigenous Americans were primitive people that lived in harmony with nature for our whole lives, so the idea of an Indigenous Empire exercising their power over nature in such a dramatic fashion was too much for some.
The original and perhaps most significant critics have been Van Remsen and Steven Cardiff, two ornithologists from Louisiana State University. In a paper covering range trends in guans, the two men take a passing shot at the grackle introduction story as unconvincing — they note that other lowland birds like American bitterns, ruddy ducks, and marsh wrens have isolated populations on the Mexican plateau, and they dismiss the codex as “a friar’s 1577 collection of animal stories told to him by Aztec informants.” Remsen and Cardiff “regard such folklore with distrust,” saying that their experience with South American Indigenous people “is sprinkled with cases of amusing, but obviously erroneous, explanations of past and present natural phenomena.”
If we can momentarily set aside the racist overtones of the second point for a moment to address their first point, the Florentine Codex actually distinguishes between the great-tailed grackles and those other birds with disjunct ranges. The American bittern is described in the codex under many Nahuatl names, including atenponaztli, which refers to a two-toned drum that the Aztecs used as a musical instrument —and anyone who has heard an American bittern’s dramatic “gunk-a-lunk” display knows exactly why this name is so fitting. This bird, however, is not described as having been imported by a past emperor.
As to the second point, these stories were not folklore. As Haemig later argued in a follow-up paper, the Florentine Codex was peer-reviewed, thoroughly researched, and based on the consistently accurate information. But perhaps more importantly, Ahuitzotl was not some semi-mythical figure in Mexican history — his reign ended only 43 years before Sahagún began work on the Florentine Codex. There were plenty of people alive who had witnessed Ahuitzotl’s introduction of the teotzanatls. Referring to the Codex as “folklore” and “a collection of animal stories” is like referring to a Vietnam veteran’s war stories as “an epic tale from a distant Age of Heroes.”
Then, of course, there’s Remsen and Cardiff’s line about South American Indigenous people. Conflating Indigenous South Americans of the 20th century with Indigenous Mexicans of the 16th century is stupid at best and racist at worst (no one would say they got lied to while on vacation in Scotland and therefore conclude a 15th century Russian text must not be reliable). But Remsen and Cardiff’s rejection of a very common phenomenon — a group of people importing and releasing exotic birds in a new location and those birds subsequently establishing a population there — simply because it is done by a pre-Columbian civilization speaks to how little agency Indigenous people are given in Western thought.
While Indigenous people are often viewed by Europeans and white colonizers are living in harmony with nature, such an idea perpetuates a harmful, racist myth of an insignificant, unchanging culture that crumpled when it met modernity. But Indigenous people dramatically shaped their environment before colonization. They constructed large cities in Mexico, the Andes, and the Mississippi River Valley. They stewarded and harvested entire forests, changing their range and composition to suit their needs. Their burning created the Great Plains. Their tree planting created the Amazon.
One of the reasons that this myth is promulgated is to suggest that the postcolonial genocide of Indigenous people was the inevitable result of Europeans’ arrival, not something that was intentional. But it was intentional, driven by a mixture of greed, pride, religious fervor, and eventually scientific racism. It just makes us feel better to say it was inevitable after the fact.
It’s also important to note that this genocide was not successful. Indigenous people still exist today and still steward their lands. Even the Aztecs, viewed as fallen empire, were not completely defeated by the Spanish — it would be many decades before the Aztec royal line lost influence, and many cultural staples of the civilization still figure prominently in modern Mexico. Aspects of Mexican food, art, and culture can all be tied back to the Triple Alliance. Even Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, is still spoken by around 1.7 million people today worldwide — about as many as speak Latvian.
And great-tailed grackles still fly over Mexico City. No matter what Europeans did to the former capital, they could not erase all signs of the Aztec Empire’s former glory. The great-tailed grackle is Ahuitzotl’s indelible fingerprint, proof that this great city was once called Tenochtitlan.
The Aztecs also had a bison in their zoo, brought down from Texas most likely. Centuries earlier, the Ancestral Pueblo of Chaco Canyon managed to trade for a pet Scarlet Macaw!