Article Reprinted from SALIDmag by Camellia Paul: A Tale of Two Owls: Ulūka and Ulama

1 day ago
12 min read

Squares of line drawings of computers inside a library with shelves of books

Ulūka

There are places that become so entangled with memory that returning to them feels less like arriving and more like reopening an old wound. My terrace is one of those places. Before I left India for graduate school in the American Midwest, this terrace had become my sanctuary— a place where I photographed sunsets, tried to break up crows quarrelling over the evening sky, tracked the changing moods of the monsoon, and listened to the city gradually surrender itself to darkness.

Barn Owl perched on top of decorative parapet

Fig 1: Barnie, October 2024. Source: Camellia Paul

Being back on the rooftop after nine months, I can feel the summer air hanging heavy tonight. Looking up at the overcast sky, I am reminded of an October night two years back— one of the finest nights of my life owing to a brilliant encounter with whom I consider the surprise of my soul.

I recall that night arriving with a waning gibbous moon that made parts of the parapet shine pale. Somewhere below, a stray dog had barked once and then lost interest in the night. Then suddenly, a luminescent form cut across the darkness and perched on the edge of the parapet with such paranormal silence that my breath caught in my throat. A Barn Owl. A living Barn Owl only a few feet away from me— the creature whose calls I had heard and recorded many times from my terrace. “Barnie!” I whispered under my breath. His feathers seemed woven from the light of a spool moon, the gold and white and ash and grey blended together so intricately that the bird almost appeared unreal. The heart-shaped face glowed in the dark and his eyes lay fixed on me with such brilliance that I froze in love and wonder.

Barnie stayed on the parapet long enough for me to play the owl call recordings I had in my phone while I kept gasping, “I love you, I love you,” what felt like a hundred times. He bobbed his head a few times in acknowledgement and gracefully lifted off to settle upon the finial at the corner of the terrace. Musing to the full moon, Barnie looked on as though the entire night belonged to him.

Until that night, I had never seen a live owl up close before, so I extended my arm toward him instinctively, absurdly hoping Barnie would perch on it— I would have welcomed the weight of his talons if it meant sharing, however briefly, the trust of such a magnificent raptor. But he simply sat there, calm and distant and gorgeous, gazing at the October moon until the world narrowed to just us two.

And then, just as suddenly as he had arrived, Barnie opened his wings and vanished into the darkness.

That extraordinary encounter changed something fundamental in the way I looked at owls. Barnie was no longer merely a nocturnal bird that had wandered onto my terrace one October night. He became my first glimpse into an entire world of stories, beliefs, and ecological realities that I had unknowingly lived alongside for years. The more I learned about owls, the more I realized that no encounter with these creatures exists in isolation. Each owl carries with it a rich constellation of ecological and cultural meanings that together shape what I later went on to define as “owlscapes” in a book chapter on the myth, mysticism, and marginalization of the owls of Bengal. (Paul, 2026)

Among India’s most widely distributed nocturnal raptors, Barnie was an Eastern Barn Owl (Tyto javanica), once considered a subspecies of the cosmopolitan Barn Owl (Tyto alba). Despite what its name suggests, the Barn Owl inhabits an astonishing range of landscapes— from village granaries, temple towers, and agricultural fields to old and abandoned buildings of bustling cities like Calcutta. Silent in flight and pale in appearance, it has perfected a life largely invisible to human eyes. Like all Tyto owls, the Barn Owl has a divided, heart-shaped facial disc that funnels the faintest rustle of rodents to asymmetrically placed ears, allowing it to hunt with extraordinary precision even in complete darkness. Farmers have long benefited from this quiet neighbor, for a single Barn Owl family consumes hundreds of rodents in a breeding season, providing an invaluable ecological service to agricultural landscapes.

Indian Goddess Lakshmi with her vahana, the Barn Owl

Fig 2: Goddess Lakshmi with her vahana, the Barn Owl. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Yet despite its usefulness, the Barn Owl occupies one of the most paradoxical positions in the Indian imagination. No other owl embodies the contradictions of the Indian owlscape quite so vividly. By “owlscape”, I define the ecocultural world in which owls exist not only as living birds, but also as cultural beings whose identities have been shaped by centuries of mythology, folklore, literature, and superstition. The owl cannot be understood solely through ecology or culture— it inhabits multi-worlds bridged by material realities and human imagination. An owlscape is therefore a landscape of meanings across which the owl flies. Owls inhabit physical spaces like forests, granaries, cities, and fields, but they also exist in histories, beliefs, narratives, and collective memory. Their lives unfold simultaneously in the material world and in the symbolic worlds humans construct around them—worlds that are themselves often reimagined, contested, and misunderstood.

For millions of Hindus, writes Devdutt Pattanaik in Pashu: Animal Tales from Hindu Mythology, the Barn Owl is “Ulūka”— both virtuous and vile, revered and reviled. The owl symbolizes the vahana (vehicle) of both Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, and her anti-deity, Alakshmi, the goddess of misfortune. When the prosperity Lakshmi provides to humankind is turned into adharmic (immoral) vices, Ulūka, always depicted in white, rises to remind people to use their wealth wisely. And yet, in the same breath, the owl dragged into the shadows of superstition. TRAFFIC India/WWF-India, in their report, “Imperilled Custodians of the Night: A Study on Illegal Trade, Trapping and Utilization of Owls in India” states, this happens especially on festivals like Diwali, where, on the one hand, light is celebrated for conquering darkness, and on the other, harmless owls are captured, trafficked, and sacrificed in the belief that their suffering can “trap” fortune itself. Thus, an apparently “sacred” body overnight becomes an instrument for use, an object for abuse. Such narratives reveal what feminist and human-animal studies scholar Donna Haraway, in her book When Species Meet, calls a “material-semiotic knot,” where the symbolic and biological become inseparable. (Pattanaik 2014; Ahmed 2010; TRAFFIC 2018; Paul 2026; Haraway 2008)

Bengali folklore, however, preserves another, gentler tradition of the Ulūka. In one Lakshmi brata-katha (a Hindu scripture, ritual, and storytelling tradition) narrated by June McDaniel, a poor widow’s son shares his food with a family of owlets roosting in a banyan tree. The grateful parent owls carry the child to Lakshmi herself, who then rewards his compassion toward nonhuman life with prosperity. Kindness toward owls, and not wealth, becomes the pathway to abundance. (McDaniel 2003)

Long before conservation biology recognized the Barn Owl as an indispensable predator in agricultural ecosystems, Bengali literature had begun imagining the bird as something far more complex than a good or evil omen. In the works of Jibanananda Das, a seminal figure in modern Bengali poetry, the Barn Owl becomes a nocturnal witness, a guardian of darkness, and a participant in the ecological rhythms of rural Bengal. His owls inhabit granaries rich with grain and mice, quietly reminding readers that the abundance of harvest depends as much upon unseen predators as upon human labor. (Das 1954)

Black and white sketch of an Eastern Barn Owl in Flight

Fig 3: A sketch of an Eastern Barn Owl in flight. Art by Camellia Paul

If Jibanananda Das restores the owl’s ecological dignity from cultural prejudice, other Bengali writers reveal how literature can also reinvent its sociocultural identity, expanding the creature’s symbolic life far beyond inherited superstition. Decades earlier, a Bengali writer and poet from British India named Sukumar Ray had transformed the owl into a symbol of wit and affectionate absurdity in his iconic collection Abol Tabol (1923). In his poem “Pyancha Aar Pyanchani” (“He-owl and She-owl”), Ray imagines an endearingly ridiculous conversation between an owl couple, where the male exuberantly praises his mate’s notoriously shrill call (probably the bloodcurdling and long-drawn-out shriek of a female Barn Owl). By celebrating precisely what conventional aesthetics would dismiss as harsh or unpleasant, Ray overturns mainstream ideas of beauty, harmony, and refinement. More importantly, he liberates the owl from its habitual role as a harbinger of doom and instead presents it as playful, domestic, humorous, and deeply alive. If folklore often tagged the owl with fear and superstition, Ray’s “nonsense verse” restores to it something equally valuable: delight. His whimsical owls remind us that literature possesses the extraordinary ability to preserve as well as reinvent inherited cultural symbols, allowing readers to perceive familiar creatures through unique lenses. (Ray, 1923)

Read together, these works demonstrate how Bengali literature functions as an important site of ecocultural negotiation, where writers, across genres and generations, unsettle inherited prejudices and expanding owlscapes by reimagines the owl as an ecological witness, philosophical companion, comic interlocutor, and fellow inhabitant of more-than-human worlds.

Ulama

Unlike Barnie, my first Forest Eagle-Owl did not arrive unexpectedly beneath the moon. I met the owl behind a wire enclosure at the Nandankanan Zoological Park in an ancient city in eastern India called Bhubaneshwar. I must have been twelve or thirteen back then. The zoo was alive with the usual excitement— kids rushing from one enclosure to another, parents reading information boards aloud, peacocks calling somewhere in the distance. Yet I remember very little of the rest of the afternoon, for what remains vividly with me is a pair of enormous amber eyes with a piercing stare.

Fig 4: Forest Eagle-Owl. Source: Parthi Thirumurugan

The magnificent raptor sat motionless upon a weathered branch, its ear tufts sticking up like horns. Dark heart-shaped streaks ran down its pale breast, while the barred wings merged seamlessly with the bark behind it. It seemed less like a bird than a fantastic beast of the forest itself, one that had briefly chosen to appear before me. Unlike Barnie’s luminous face which invited affinity, the formidable appearance of the Forest Eagle-Owl resisted familiarity. There was something uncanny and ancient about its stillness, as though it had mastered the art of observation long before humans had learned to name trees.

Only much later did I realize that the Forest Eagle-Owl (Ketupa nipalensis, formerly Bubo nipalensis) is among the largest forest-dwelling owls native to the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Unlike the Barn Owl, which has adapted to both human-made and natural landscapes, the Forest Eagle-Owl belongs almost entirely to dense evergreen and wet deciduous forests where it remains remarkably elusive. This large owl has been recorded bringing down peacocks, flying squirrels, deer fawn, drongos and pretty much anything else it can get its talons on. Because the species requires extensive territories with mature forest cover, deforestation and fragmentation remain its greatest long-term threats.

Also known as the Spot-bellied Eagle-owl, the Forest Eagle-Owl occupies a contrasting position within the Indian owlscape. If the Barn Owl exists at the tense intersection of fortune and superstition, the eagle-owl perches the threshold between wilderness and fear. Hidden within wildwoods and more often heard than seen, its deep, unsettling human-like screams have inspired generations of stories across South Asia, comments Surya Ramachandran, in “The Cry of the Ulama!” (Ramachandran, 2020)

Black and white sketch of a Forest Eagle-Owl

Fig 5: A sketch of a Forest Eagle-Owl. Art by Camellia Paul

In Sri Lanka, the Forest Eagle-Owl is associated with the cryptid “Ulama”, or Devil Bird, whose blood-curdling cries were long believed to foretell death across the Palk Strait in Sri Lanka. As the legend goes, a young woman fled into the forest in unbearable grief after discovering that her jealous husband had murdered their infant son and unknowingly fed the child’s flesh to her in the form of newborn curry. Screaming into the darkness of the woods, she killed herself, and was transformed into the Devil Bird. Ever since, her mournful cries have echoed through the jungles at night, and those unfortunate enough to hear them are believed to be marked by misfortune or death. (Ramachandran, 2020)

Descriptions of the Ulama have remained remarkably consistent across generations. Locals speak of a huge owl-like bird whose calls rise and fall with an almost human cadence, resembling the anguished cries of a woman or child. As early as 1681, the British sea captain Robert Knox referred to the mysterious creature simply as “the voice of the night,” recording how deeply it had embedded itself within Sri Lankan folklore. (Knox 1681; Hernandez 2023)

For decades, outsiders dismissed the Ulama as little more than superstition— a figment of imagination, a pseudoscientific cryptid born from fear of the forest. Yet local communities never doubted its existence. In the early twenty-first century, the legendary Devil Bird came to be increasingly associated with the elusive Forest Eagle-Owl whose immense size, prominent ear tufts, and spine-tingling vocalizations correspond strikingly with generations of local descriptions. The popular short documentary The Devil Bird of Sri Lanka (2014), directed by Thivanka Rukshan Perera, brought this association to a wider audience through rare wildlife footage of the owl in its natural habitat. (Perera 2014)

This discovery did not prove that folklore had documented a supernatural being. Rather, it revealed something perhaps even more compelling: long before the species’ behaviour was widely understood through ornithology, local ecological knowledge and citizen science had already preserved remarkably accurate observations of one of South Asia’s most elusive raptors.

The story of the Ulama therefore reveals one of the central insights of owlscapes: myth and folklore are not always the opposite of science. They often represent alternative ways of mapping landscapes, encoding observations of animals within narratives that communities carry across generations. The supernatural emerges not because the owl is unreal, but because encounters with such an elusive creature exceed ordinary expectations. Each bird is at once a living predator and a cultural presence, a creature of habitat and a creature of story. Its cry becomes a prophecy, its invisibility becomes mystery, and its rare appearance becomes legend. In that sense, the Forest Eagle-Owl inhabits an owlscape much like that of the Barn Owl— one where ecological reality and cultural imagination always coexist in a single world, while continuing to shape one another. (Paul 2026; Haraway 2008)

To understand either owl fully, then, we must look beyond its taxonomy, behavior, and ecological role, and attend to the myths, memories, fears, and forms of knowledge through which human communities encounter it. Owlscapes remind us to protect and nurture these worlds together, for it is precisely in their entanglement that the owl’s meaning—and its vulnerability—comes into view.

Looking back, I realize my childhood fascination with the owl at Nandankanan was less about the spectacular exotic, and more about the mystery of the unknown. Behind the enclosure was a bird that carried entire forests within its feathers— its natural history written in camouflage, its cultural history written in myth and lore. If Barnie introduced me to the owls inhabiting urban and rural spaces, the Forest Eagle-Owl reminded me that there still exist places where forests retain their oldest raconteurs, and where every haunting call asks whether we fear darkness itself, or we have forgotten to seek what lies within.

Perhaps that is why I find myself returning, time and again, to Barnie on my old terrace in Calcutta, and to the solemn Forest Eagle-Owl in Bhubaneswar. Between the two, lies an entire owlscape: between Ulūka, Lakshmi’s sacred companion who reminds us that prosperity demands ethical responsibility, and Ulama, the haunted voice of the Sri Lankan forests whose cries preserve centuries of ecological memory. One promises abundance, while the other warns of mortality. Yet both are, in the end, simply owls— remarkable apex predators whose lives are interwoven with ours through facts and fantasies.

If an admirer of owls is a “strigiphile”, then I believe I have long crossed that threshold and become a “strigimaniac.” What began as a childhood passion has gradually grown into creative and academic pursuits around these magnificent creatures and the many worlds they inhabit. Today, more than 250 species of owls are known worldwide, of which thirty-eight occur across the Indian subcontinent. (Owl Research Institute n.d.)

Every year, August 4 is cherished as International Owl Awareness Day, but perhaps a single day is too brief for creatures that have accompanied human imagination for millennia. If the stories of Ulūka and Ulama teach us anything, it is that awareness begins not with statistics but with attention— with pausing long enough to look, to listen, and to question the narratives we have inherited. Whether beneath an October moon on an urban terrace or in the thick undergrowth of forests of South Asia, every owl reminds us that the night is far richer than our fears. And if we learn to protect the majestic birds that inhabit its darkness, we might end up safeguarding stories, landscapes, and futures to which we belong.

— Camellia Paul, PhD student in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

About the Author: Camellia's research and publications engage with environmental humanities, ecocriticism, multispecies studies, folklore, mythology, and human–owl relationships, particularly across South Asia and North America. She has presented award-winning research on "Bengal owlscapes" at an interdisciplinary conference in South Korea, work that was subsequently published by Bloomsbury. She is also a visual artist whose poetry and artwork regularly appear in literary journals and anthologies. Camellia took part in a collaboration with the Owl Research Institute in posting 19 consecutive social media posts for each of the 19 species of Owls in North America beginning on Aug. 4th, 2026, Owl Awareness Day. She provided her unique artwork artwork as well as the cultural and mythological significance of each owl species. This article was re-printed with permission from the Summer Issue of SALIDMag, link below:

https://csames.illinois.edu/sas/SALIDmag

You can follow Camellia Paul on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/stories/cammeowl/

Further Reading and References