In Search Of The Devil Bird: Encounters with Sri Lanka’s Owls

This podcasts is a search for Sri Lanka’s notorious Devil Bird, encountering on the way, all 12 of its distinguished owls. Once upon a time, uncountable centuries ago, a woman sat done to enjoy a curry supper with her husband. With hindsight, she ought to have been more alert: after all, her husband making dinner was no usual thing. But then, nor was the curry, for nestling amongst the spices and vegetables she discovered a tiny finger. All that was left of her infant son. Suspicion, jealousy, alcohol and an excess of testosterone were just some of the other apparent ingredients found in that fateful dinner. A husband deeply suspicious of his wife’s fidelity; his acid distrust of his young’s son’s real paternity – it all came together in a grisly act of filicide. Murdering his uncertain heir, the man cooked and served up his tiny body to his wife. Although murdering one’s child is relatively common (in America, for example, there are some 2000 cases per year), combining the appalling deed with fine dining is so rare as to be almost unparalleled. Yet this, according to one of the most dogged folk myths of Sri Lanka, is exactly what occurred in that jungle one terrible night. Unhinged by grief, the mother fled screaming into the forest, where the gods, exhibiting that kind of double edged kindness that all ancient gods seem to excel at. They turned her into a bird – the ulama, or devil bird, or to be still more exact, what is thought to be the Sri Lankan Spot-bellied Eagle Owl. In his book “Seeing Ceylon,” published in 1965, the remarkable Renaissance Burger, R. L. Brohier, surveyor, historian and the driving force behind the Gal Oya Reservoir, the island’s largest water tank, famously described the “clucking strangling sobs” the bird makes - “a scream which froze the blood”, “a series of dreadful shrieks as if coming from a soul in great agony of torment.” For so ghoulish and intemperate a description, this one has the rare advantage of being accurate. The owl’s call really does sound as if a small infant is being murdered; or his mother is wailing with unconsolable wretchedness. Long after the owl has flown away, the sound stays with you, not unlike a spicy meal itself or as if Beethoven’s Fifth had become entangled with Heavy Metal. Once heard, never forgotten. The owl itself is huge – the sixth largest in the world, with a wingspan approaching six feet. Despite this, it is rarely seen – being not only almost wholly nocturnal but also sticking to the most impenetrable parts of large forests. Spotted in such places as Yala, Wilpattu, and Sinharaja, it has also been seen and – of course – heard in Kurunegala, Kandy – and Galagedera, with one dropping in with alarming mateyness several nights a year at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. Its visual coyness it a great pity for the bird is something of a looker, resembling a ghostly and very aristocratic dowager, given to looking at the world with quizzical mistrust, its ashy white feathers picked out with dark highlights like the ermine Robe of State worn by British monarchs at their coronation. Where it betters any monarch is in its gorgeous horizontal ear tufts – which can be around 3 inches in length, making the bird’s head appear as it has a pair of assistant wings of its own, a living, breathing Douglas DC-4. Zealous vegetarians they are not, their diet consisting of meat, more meat, and then still more, in all shapes and sizes – from tiny cowering rodents to recorded feasts involving civets, jackets, deer, and even monkeys. They pass their carnivorous inclinations onto their young from the start, raising them on meat before taking them off for short hunting trips to learn the juicy arts of entrapment. Thankfully, civilization’s perpetual intrusions have had little impact on their status, and they are widely recorded by numerate ornithologists – this despite the fact that mating pairs tend to lay but a single egg a year. Sri Lanka marks the southernmost limit of their territory, which extends north to the Himalayas and east to Vietnam, making them, if not endemic to the island, then at least fully paid up residents. Even so, they stand as something of a standard-bearer for the island’s owls in general, not just for their audacious glamour and history – but also that something quite so vast should live with such surreptitious ease in the modern world. In this they are not alone. Almost 500 bird species have been recorded on the island – although arguments rage over quite how many are endemic to Sri Lanka. Experts argue that only somewhere between 34 and 23 are truly endemic – a mere 5 or 6 per cent of the avian population. To put this in context, the authoritative International Ornithologists' Union classes 255 birds worldwide as owls of one kind or another. Looked at from this perspective Sri Lanka is something of a high achiever - a country that has 0.01% of the world’...