Its association with storms makes the storm petrel a bird of bad omen to mariners; they are said to either foretell or cause bad weather. A more prosaic explanation of their appearance in rough weather is that, like most oceanic seabirds, they rely on the winds to support them in flight and just sit on the water surface when becalmed. The birds were sometimes thought to be the souls of perished sailors, and killing a petrel was believed to bring bad luck. The petrel's reputation led to the old name of "witch", although the commonest of the folk names is Mother Carey's chicken, a name also used for storm petrels in general in the UK and North America from at least 1767. This is believed to be a corruption of "mater cara" ("dear mother", the Virgin Mary), a reference to the supernatural Mother Carey, or a superstitious modification of an earlier "Mother Mary's chicken" to reduce the potency of the religious name. The Mother Carey character appears a number of times in literature. In the Cicely Fox Smith poem "Mother Carey", she calls old sailors to return to the sea, but in John Masefield's poem of the same name she is seen as a wrecker of ships. She appears as a fairy in Charles Kingsley's "The Water Babies" and is depicted in one of Jessie Willcox Smith's illustrations for the book.