The Tizzie-Whizie is a small, composite creature said to have been spotted around Bowness-on-Windermere around the turn of the twentieth century, described in the tradition as having the body of a hedgehog, the tail of a squirrel, and a pair of wings resembling a bee's, an unmistakably whimsical combination that sets it apart immediately from the more sinister cryptids collected elsewhere in this record.
Unlike most cryptids gathered here, the Tizzie-Whizie carries its own built-in scepticism right from the start: the most common account of its origin holds that Windermere boatmen invented the creature specifically to entertain, or gently wind up, the Victorian and Edwardian tourists who flocked to the Lake District during the period, a piece of self-aware local whimsy rather than any genuinely claimed sighting of a real animal.
It is recorded here as folklore about a joke rather than folklore about a creature, honestly tagged as such throughout, because the character has nonetheless gone on to become a genuine and long-lived part of Bowness's local identity and its gift-shop iconography, a fictional animal that has outlived the tourists it was originally invented to amuse.
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