In Seeing Ceylon, R.L. Brohier describes the Devil Bird’s cry as “a scream which froze the blood”, “a series of dreadful shrieks as if coming from a soul in great agony of torment” and as “clucking strangling sobs”. Sri Lanka’s Devil Bird takes its place among other fantastical creatures in a wider body of global folklore attached to animals or cryptids.
Pre-colonial folklore and mythology in Sri Lanka – from the Salalihini Sandeshaya and the Paravi Sandeshaya to the Mahavamsa – is dotted with tales about animals but curiously, there are no historical allusions to an animal making the call of the devil in written folklore. The Devil Bird, also known as the Ulama or as Pey Kuruvi in the east, is a part of non-written folklore and oral storytelling passed down from one generation to another in Sri Lanka, explains Dr Sampath Seneviratne, Ornithologist and a Scientist studying the secrets of Asia’s birds at his lab, the Avian Evolution Node, at the University of Colombo. But over the years, ornithologists have managed to pinpoint certain species to which the call could be attached to.
The Myth, the Legend
The Devil Bird’s call is said to foreshadow a death in the village or bad news. Depending on where you are oin the island, the tale myth morphs accordingly. But the tale is largely as follows.
Once, there lived a family at the edge of a forest – a young couple and their son. The father has simmering suspicions about the paternity of his son and one day, these doubts bubble over. He gets drunk and fights with his wife and the wife, upset, leaves the house briefly to cool down. When she returns, she finds that her husband has made a meal for her as a peace offering and she begins to eat. While eating, she notices that her son is missing and then comes across a small finger in the dish. She realizes with a deep horror that she is eating her son – her husband had killed their son and cooked him.
When the enormity of what her husband had done dawns on her, in a blur of grief, she takes a wooden spoon and stabs herself, rushing into the forest and cursing her husband. The Gods take pity on her and turn her into a bird.
There are multiple variations on this theme. In some versions, the husband is a farmer who comes home with meat for the night’s meal and then goes to have a bath only to find the dog has run off with the meat. In others, he is a hunter who is hungry and is in a vile mood about coming home empty-handed and murders his son for meat. In another, it is the wife who cooks the meat her husband brings. But this is nit-picking – the crux of the tale is hinged on an uncontrollable male rage, filicide and a mother’s wild sorrow. The cry of the Devil Bird is believed to be the spirit of the anguished mother, echoing her feral grief. “It was a guttural cry which sounded as if someone was being strangulated,” writes Uragoda in Traditions of Sri Lanka, recalling the first time he heard the Devil Bird’s call, while camping in Ruhuna National Park.
When Folklore meets Science
“There is no doubt in the science of bird studies, a.k.a. ornithology that the ulama call is nothing but a large predatory bird,” says Dr Sampath swiftly dismantling the bird call from the folklore that surrounds it. He explains that while colonial naturalists weren’t the first to discover the phenomena, they were the first to start looking into it in order to pinpoint what the particular animal could be. They had a few clues to work on: they knew the call came from the forest only at night, they knew it was a powerful call and it was likely to be a predatory bird.
In their quest to identify the species making the call, Dr R.L. Spittel and his fellow hunters shot and killed four large, predatory, nocturnal birds they believed could be the Devil Bird: the Spot-bellied Eagle-owl, the Crested Hawk-eagle, the Oriental Honey-buzzard and the Legge’s Hawk-eagle.
All of these bird calls have an eerie, haunted nature, notes Dr Sampath. But from all the species listed above, there is a broad consensus that the most likely contender for the devil bird is the Spot-bellied Eagle Owl. “The stories of the Devil Bird are most common in the dry foothills of Sri Lanka such as Wasgamuwa, Matale, Mahiyangana and Badulla, where thickets of the best forest and the strongholds of the Spot-bellied Eagle Owl can be found,” he explains.
The owl is the largest of all of Sri Lanka’s 12 species of owls and grows to be the size of a turkey. With a yellow bill and large black eyes, it has a piercing call befitting its size and its vocalization sounds remarkably human. Its ear tufts protrude out and as some point out, are almost reminiscent of the wooden spoon the distraught mother in the folk tale stabbed her head with. The Spot-bellied Eagle Owl’s powerful talons are an indicator of the small and medium-sized mammals it feeds on (loris, civet cats, flying squirrels and more) and the females are slightly larger than the males. “Spot-bellied Eagle Owls, like all large predatory birds, form intelligent and sophisticated families”, points out Dr Sampath. “When the chicks hatch, the parents feed them small pieces of meat and as they grow they are then introduced to partly- killed prey. When the chicks are bigger, they are taken on short hunting trips and this learning process is critical.”
As large predatory birds require a considerable amount of prey, the population density of birds in an area is low, Dr Sampath points outexplains. While this works well during hunting, the quest for a mate becomes a struggle for top predators like the Spot-bellied Eagle Owl. Therefore, the human-sounding, high-pitched call associated with the Devil Bird myth, is likely a territorial or breeding call. It is heard frequently during breeding season when a bird calls from a tall tree at night, in the hopes of attracting a mate or suppressing any avian competition in their territory.
How to Unpack a Myth
Owls are recurring animal motifs in folklore and mythology around the world but how did the romantic mating call of the Eagle Owl acquire such grim overtones of death and devils, becoming synonymous with bad news? The answer says more about humans than the bird itself.
In Sri Lanka, there are a string of events which may have helped to attach causation and correlation to the myth of the Devil Bird, notes Dr Sampath. The breeding season for these large owls occurs during the first three months of the year which is also the dry season which falls between January to April. During this season, predatory animals often leave the forest and make their way to populous zones in search of water. This results in human encounters and accidents, he explains. Concurrently, when people stay up late for funerals or to tend to those unwell, they hear the everyday nocturnal sounds they would normally blissfully sleep through and begin to attach meaning to these.
People believe that devils are attracted to death and lurk in the forest. When confronted with the bird’s haunting call late at night and compounded by an innately human fear of darkness and night at a time when your sensory tools are at its lowest point, it becomes easy to see how causality and correlation is are added onto these cries and to examine how these associations came about, explains Dr Sampath. The Eagle Owl’s melancholy human-sounding cry also adds to the cultural phenomena of the Devil Bird.
There are recordings of this Eagle Owl’s cry on the internet. And when listening to its call in isolation, far away from a forest, you might well wonder what the fuss is all about. Its call is haunting but not particularly menacing. Sad and eerie, perhaps and with human overtones. What augments the cultural phenomena and the myth of the devil bird is its socio-environmental circumstances and the way people respond to it, Dr Sampath points out. The folklore which surrounds the Devil Bird and the fear built around it are is a sociological reflection of us than the bird itself.
