4 July: Scarecrows:

A scarecrow is an effigy, usually shaped like a human being, placed in a field to scare away the birds which might otherwise eat the crops. The first Sunday in July is Build a Scarecrow Day, so here are ten facts about scarecrows you might not know.

1. The earliest scarecrows were made in ancient Egypt around 3,000 years ago to scare birds away from the Wheat fields beside the Nile.
2. They were also used in ancient Greece, where farmers would make them to look like Priapus, the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite. This was because of a myth that Priapus was an extremely ugly child who'd scare away the birds whenever he played in the vineyards.
3. In Medieval Britain, young boys were often employed as “bird scarers”, who were paid to wander around the fields throwing stones at birds. Farmers started making artificial scarecrows after the plague, when there was a shortage of young boys.
4. The first known usage of the word “scarecrow” in English literature was in Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Since then, there have been numerous fictional scarecrows. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story called Feathertop, about a scarecrow which was brought to life by a Witch; both Marvel and DC have villains called Scarecrow, although they are completely different characters; Barbara Euphan Todd created the friendly scarecrow Worzel Gummidge in the 1930s and he later got his own TV show; but probably the most famous is the scarecrow in Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, played by Ray Bolger in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and by Michael Jackson in The Wiz, who goes in search of a Brain.
5. There are songs about scarecrows, too. Pink Floyd's debut album includes a track called Scarecrow, and XTC's album Oranges & Lemons includes a track called Scarecrow People who 'ain't got no brains' and 'ain't got no Hearts' and are the destiny of the human race as a result of wars and pollution.
6. The bird scaring function of a scarecrow isn't just because it looks vaguely like a person. They get dressed in cast off clothing for a reason – the clothes will have the smell of their former human owners lingering about them, so as far as the birds are concerned, they smell like humans, too. In Japan, they go a step further and hang meat and fish bones from their scarecrows which would scare away anything with a sense of smell!
7. Talking of Japan, there is a village there called Nagoro, which has a human population of 35, but a scarecrow population of over 350.
8. There are a number of old dialect words for scarecrows in different parts of Britain. Hay-man (England), Hodmedod (Berkshire), Murmet (Devon), Mommet (Somerset), Mawkin (Sussex), Bwbach (Wales), Gallybagger (Isle of Wight), Tattie Bogal (Isle of Skye); and in Scotland they are Bodach-rocais (which literally means "old man of the rooks").
9. The 1990s and 2000s saw a trend of towns and villages holding scarecrow festivals where householders and businesses display scarecrows in their gardens and shop windows. There may be a scarecrow trail and events to raise money for charity. One of the earliest was the Urchfont Scarecrow Festival which attracts up to 10,000 people every year. Or at least in years when there isn't a plague. Scarecrow festivals aren't unique to Britain, though. In Canada there are also scarecrow festivals, usually in the autumn and associated with Halloween. The scarecrows there have Pumpkins for heads. One of the latest places to jump on the scarecrow festival bandwagon is the Philippines. The world record for the largest number of scarecrows in one place is 3,812 at National Forest Adventure Farm in Staffordshire, on 7 August 2014.
10. If the thought of that many scarecrows in one place is giving you the heebie-jeebies then it may be that you suffer from Formidophobia, the irrational fear of scarecrows.

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