Foundling-Bird (Fundevogel)

In the Grimm tale, a forester hunting in the woods hears a child's cries and finds a baby at the top of a tall tree in a bird of prey's nest. He brings the infant home and names him Fundevogel (literally 'found/bird'), marking the child by the biographical incident that a bird had carried him to a nest. The name functions as both proper name and origin-label within the household narrative; the character is treated as human and socialized in the forester's family.

The tale provides no persistent avian or supernatural physical traits: Fundevogel is depicted and raised as an ordinary human boy alongside the forester's daughter Lenchen. The narrative gives no special description of birdlike morphology or ongoing outward signs of nonhuman origin.

Within the single Grimm narrative episode, Fundevogel and Lenchen employ a sequence of metamorphoses during a pursuit: the pair change into (1) a rosebush and a rose, (2) a church and a chandelier, and (3) a pond and a duck, the last of which results in the drowning of their would‑be killer. These transformations are presented as narrative motif typical of ATU 313A (the girl helps the hero flee) and are not described in the source as a generalized, persistent supernatural faculty nor ascribed an explicit mechanism or origin.