Billdad - [Fearsome Critter]

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The Billdad - [fearsome citter] - (Latin name: Saltipiscator falcorostratus.)

• About this critter:

A creature Local to Boundary Pond, Maine. it has the Legs of a 🦘beak of a 🦅 body of an 🦦, & an especially hard 🦫tail. It can leap over 50ft in a single bound: It Slaps the water with its flat tail to stun fish, the sound of which is often mistaken for canoe paddles. People used to think it might be tasty & chefs figured that the meat might go well with pasta in a Goulash!! But The only man who ever ate one – “Bill Murphy” had a taste of the Camp Chefs Slumgullion & immediately and absolutely lost his mind: bill suffered a strange reaction: his body stiffened, his eyes glazed, his hands clutched the table edge & with a wild yell he rushed out of the shanty, down to the lake, he leapt off the dock, clearing 50 yards, The crazed man couldn’t swim and he sank like a stone... Needless to say nobody ever ate billdad meat again…

•History & early appearances:

It's a critter first named and catalogued in WilliamTCox's Fearsome Creatures 1910 with the illustration, he includes a story:

" Up to three years ago the opinion was current among lumber jacks that the billdad was fine eating, but since the beasts are exceedingly shy and hard to catch no one was able to remember having tasted the meat. That fall one was killed on Boundary Pond and brought into the Great Northern Paper Company's camp on Hurricane Lake, where the cook made a most savory slumgullion of it. The first (and only) man to taste it was Bill Murphy, a tote-road swamper from Ambegegis. After the first mouthful his body stiffened, his eyes glazed, and his hands clutched the table edge. With a wild yell he rushed out of the cook-house, down to the lake, and leaped clear out fifty yards, coming down in a sitting posture—exactly like a billdad catching a fish. Of course, he sank like a stone. Since then not a lumber jack in Maine will touch billdad meat, not even with a pike pole."

Boundary Pond is a real place, a very ‘out of the way’ fishing location for the time: its called boundary because its right on the border of Canada and the USA. - I'd suppose the Billdad “leaps & bounds” for that punny reason.