Meadowlark belongs to the company of the First People of Maidu narrative, the animal-persons of the mythic age before the world was finished. In one of the variant accounts of the origin collected by Dixon, the creator and Coyote drift on the water singing and hoping to find land, and it is Meadowlark's nest that they discover and stretch out to make the beginning of the earth. The meadowlark recurs through the wider Maidu tale-cycle as one of the talking creatures of that first age; here it has a small but distinct part in the very making of the land, assisting the creator's work.