Controversial Muhammad Ali ‘golly’ scarecrow floors British boxing fans

For thousands of years scarecrows have helped humans save their crops from crows and other hungry mouths and provided an outlet for human creativity.
Scarecrows are as old and as mysterious as human nature and have been useful friends to humans since the mists of early time.
Scarecrow genealogy is rooted in a rural life style. The Egyptians used the first scarecrows in recorded history to use to protect wheat fields along the Nile River from flocks of quail.
Egyptian farmers installed wooden frames in their fields and covered them with nets. Then they hid in the fields, scared the quail into the nets and took them home to eat for dinner.
Greek farmers in 2,500 BC carved wooden scarecrows to look like Priapus, the son of the god Dionysus and the goddess Aphrodite, who supposedly was ugly enough to scare birds away from the vineyards and ensure good harvests.
They painted their wooden scarecrows purple and put a club in one hand to scare away the birds and a sickle in the other for a good harvest.
The Romans copied the Greek scarecrow custom and when Roman armies marched through the Europe they introduced Priapus scarecrows to the people there.
Almost simultaneously with the Greeks and Romans, Japanese farmers made scarecrows to protect their rice fields.
They made scarecrows called kakashis, shaped like people. They dressed the kakashis in a raincoat and a round straw hat and often added bows and arrows to make them look more threatening.

In Germany, scarecrows were wooden and shaped to look like witches. Witch scarecrows were supposed to hasten the coming of spring.
In medieval Britain, young boys and girls were used as live scarecrows or “bird scarers.”
They would patrol the fields of crops and scare away birds by waving their arms or throwing stones. In later times, farmers stuffed sacks of straw, made faces of gourds, and leaned the straw man against pole to scare away birds.