Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter

from the April 10, 2016 Newsletter issued from Hacienda Chichen Resort beside Chichén Itzá Ruins; limestone bedrock; elevation ~39m (~128ft), N20.675°, W88.569°; central Yucatán state, MÉXICO
UAYCHIVOS & WÁAY PEEKS
The name "uaychivo" is interesting. A Maya table-waiter explained to me that of course a chivo is a goat, but it's also a word for the Devil. In fact, the Devil often is illustrated as a goatlike creature. "Uay!" is what people here might exclaim if they encounter something extraordinary, the way a gringo might say "Wow!" Therefore, according to my friend, the word "uaychivo" can more or less be translated as "wow-devil."

However, in last year's October 4th Newsletter written in Yaxunah, Maya villagers told us about wáays, wáays being witch-doctor-type people who change back and forth between certain kinds of animals, usually dogs and cats. Despite my Maya friend's interpretation of "uay" as "wow," I think the words wáay and uaychivo are closely related. Using Spanish rules of spelling, wáay also could be written uáay. I think the Maya of Yaxunah and the Chichén Itzá area are talking about the same thing.

Back in Yaxunah we were told of different kinds of "wáays," each based on a different kind of animal. A dog-wáay is a "wáay peek," and I wrote then that wáay peeks "...usually don't do much except freak people out, the way the big, white dog does in Yaxunah -- though there are stories of wáay peeks who do such mischief as steal food off people's tables, or even crawl up onto beds of pretty girls and lick them all over."

Here in the Chichén Itzá area, uaychivos seem to have a meaner streak to them than Yaxunah's wáays. Also, instead of simply changing back and forth between their human and their animal forms, here the human removes his or her own head and replaces it with that of an animal before more or less becoming that animal until it's time to be human again, when the heads are returned to their normal bodies.

The dead Chichen Itza Bumblebee Millipede possibly died where it is, just coincidentally ending up next to two uaychivo poops. However, also at Yaxunah we saw that sometimes hunters deep inside the forest, if they see a certain unusual cavity in a rock wall, for example, or maybe an oddly formed rock that's obviously natural but seems crafted by human hand, then the hunter may leave there a modest "offering" -- maybe a flower, or a pretty leaf. No one would explain to me why this is done, but intuition told me that it's a gesture of the visitor saying, "I know that this spot belongs to a spirit, and that I am an outsider here, so with this offering I'm recognizing the spirit's presence and right to be here, and I ask that it let me come and go as I must."

This reminds me of something I wrote in October, 1996, in Copper Canyon, Chihuahua, in Tarahumara territory in northwestern Mexico, when I didn't know about these matters:

"... in late afternoon I scout for a camping spot there. Well hidden behind a tangle of briars, eroded into a vertical rock face about five feet above the little stream's floodplain, I find a cavity almost too perfect to be true. Perfectly dry, a little longer than I am, and deep enough for my whole body to fit into, nature could not have provided a better sleeping platform. An egg-size rock lies in the hollow's exact center. The rock is of a curious shape, color, and texture, completely different from the material forming surrounding cliffs and boulders. Clearly, someone has carried this rock from some distance away and left it here on purpose."

That's from my 1996 Mexican Birding Trip book, online at ../mexbirds/