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Aesop's Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs (2002)

499. THE LARK AND HER CREST
Perry 447 (Aristophanes, Birds 471 ff.)

Aesop says that the crested lark was the first bird to be created, even before Gaia, the Earth. As a result, when the lark's father became sick and died, there was no earth to bury him in. On the fifth day that his body had been lying there, the frustrated lark, not knowing what else to do, buried her father in her own head.

Note: Aelian, Characteristics of Animals 16.5, links this story in Aristophanes to a similar story about the hoopoe which he claims to have found in the legends of 'Indian Brahmins.' Both stories provide an aetiology for the bird's crest of feathers, although the metamorphosis of the lark is only implied in the Greek version.

Source: Aesop's Fables. A new translation by Laura Gibbs. Oxford University Press (World's Classics): Oxford, 2002.
NOTE: New cover, with new ISBN, published in 2008; contents of book unchanged.