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Devil-Bird
A bird that occupies the
shadowy borderland between myth and reality is the Sri Lankan devil-bird.
According to a popular myth of that
country, retold in Sir J. Emerson Tennent's Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon
(1861), a jealous husband, doubting the paternity of his son, killed the child and made a
curry of the flesh, which his unsuspecting wife began to eat. Finding her son's finger in
the dish, the horrified woman fled to the forest, where she killed herself. According to
Buddhist belief, she was then changed into an ulama, or devil-bird, which utters
spine-chilling screams of grief.
Such a creature would appear to be pure
myth, yet there is said to be an actual bird in Sri Lanka that emits hideous screams. In
Tennent's book, a Mr. Mitford, who was reputedly an expert on the island's bird life, gave
a graphic description of the bird's cry as "indescribable, the most appalling that
can be imagined, and scarcely to be heard without shuddering; I can only compare it to a
boy in torture, whose screams are being stopped by being strangled.
Although many people have heard the
devilbird's bloodcurdling shrieks, very few have apparently seen the creature, and its
true identity remains a mystery. Some ornithologists have suggested that the bird is
simply the brown wood owl, but witnesses who claim to have seen the devil-bird say that it
has a long tail and cuckoo-shaped body and resembles a nightjar, not an owl. Yet there is
no known species of nightjar that screams. So the question remains. Is the devil-bird a
figment of the imagination or an actual creature?
Related
books.
Further info:
The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
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