I’m an ornithologist, which means that I am a scientist who studies birds. I wander deep into the woods, in wilderness areas far from the beaten track, in my attempts to catalog every manner of bird that lives in the various parts of the Amazon rainforest. I pay a lot of attention to jungle noises, every little chirp or squeak I hear; that’s because every bird has its own distinctive sounds, and it is much easier to hear a bird sing than to actually spot it. When I know how to identify the sound I hear, my work is simple – all I have to do is jot down the name of its author and that’s it. Things get quite a bit trickier when I hear something I’m totally unfamiliar with. When that happens, I track it down until I find the culprit. I even venture into the night, when owls and nightjars make themselves heard. It was during one of these outings that I met a curupira.

Soon after I began studying birds in the Amazon, twenty-some years back, I got to know a nocturnal call given on moonlit nights, but I couldn’t tell where it came from. It was a long, melancholy whistle, like the sound you hear from a falling bombshell in war movies just before the explosion: ”weeeeeeeeeeooooooooh”.

I asked my colleagues about it – both researchers and field hands – but no one could tell me who made the sound. One suggested that it might be the Sunbittern, a ground-dwelling bird with a whistled song. At that time I’d never seen a Sunbittern, so every time I heard that sound at night I would grab my flashlight and start looking for the bird close to the ground. I would whistle back to it once in a while to attract the mysterious bird, but I never seemed to get close to it, let alone to see the fellow.

At that time, my work companion was a man named Jairo Miranda Lopes, who soon tipped me off, “That’s no Sunbittern, Mario. I was raised in the backwoods of the state of Pará and I know that bird quite well; I even know what its nest looks like and I know that it lives in the floodplains close to lakes and river banks, not on the solid ground of upland rainforest. Its voice is also different. Now, I’m not sure what this bird of yours is, perhaps it’s some owl or something, but it is certainly not a Sunbittern.” Jairo was an excellent field assistant, who really knew his stuff, and so I believed him.

Some two years passed like this, and then one evening, just at nightfall, with a nearly full moon high in the sky, I once again heard that mysterious sound. I was in a field camp at the edge of the woods, and I asked Jairo, who was busy preparing our dinner, if he had heard it too. “You know,” I said, “The one you insist is no Sunbittern,” and I then whistled my imitatation of the elusive call.

Just at that moment, a bird landed on the tip of a dead branch high up on a large tree just beside our camp. And then we both heard that sad and haunting whistled call. In the dim light of the darkening night, we couldn’t see much, but the bird continued to whistle away on the same branch until the sky finally darkened enough for my flashlight to light it up well. Through my binoculars I saw that it was actually a small potoo, the size of a nighthawk, quite dark and with a big white patch on its wing. In other words, an unknown species for the Amazon rainforest!


Potoos are nocturnal birds from a family that includes the “moon mother,” mãe-da-lua, as it is known in Brazil. They resemble owls except that they do not hunt with their claws and only prey on insects. Actually, they are closer to the nighthawks and nightjars. Both hunt in flight, catching flying insects, such as beetles and katydids, with their wide open frog-like mouths. Their eyes shine red and large in the beam of a flashlight. The biggest difference between nightjars and potoos is that the former perch on the ground or horizontally on a tree branch, while potoos always sit upright on a branch, often at its very tip. By day, a startled potoo stretches its body and “freezes”, bill pointing upwards, looking like an extension of the branch on which it’s perched, while its camouflaged pattern imitates tree bark.

Potoos are nocturnal birds reminiscent of owls, with huge eyes for night vision that give off a bright red glow in the beam of a light. This and the following photos depict the Common Potoo (Nyctibius griseus), a species somewhat larger than the new one (photo by the author).

But there were more revelations in store for me that night. While we were still celebrating our surprising discovery, Jairo confessed to me that he and other people were actually quite familiar with that night call, without ever having seen its author. He said that people usually believed it to be the whistling of the curupira and that he knew a young fellow who grew so scared when he heard it that he couldn’t sleep at night.

Years later, I whistled that call to a man who lived close to a great woods, and I asked him if he knew what it was. His eyes shone with my imitation: “Of course I know that sound. I’ve heard it countless times, mostly on moonlit nights.” ”And what do you think produces such a sound?” I pressed. “Well,” he said, sheepishly, “We say over here that it’s that little curupira. I’m not sure myself if I believe it, but that’s what folks say.”

Over the years now, I’ve encountered this bird in a number of places in the state of Amazonas, from Borba to Barcelos, and in the state of Pará too. Research colleagues have since found it in the state of Acre and even in Peru and in the Guyanas. A bird that was unknown to science, until just a few years ago, now seems to pop up all over the Amazon! And everywhere, when I ask locals if they know what that sound is, the reply is invariably the same. They all know what it is; it’s the curupira.

To me, this story contains two lessons. The first is that country folk have a great deal of knowledge that can help me with my work. By simply mimicking the call of a bird to a seasoned inhabitant, I can ascertain whether that species occurs in the region. The other lesson is that there is a lot to be discovered in this vast Amazon basin.

This “new” bird, a species still not officially described by scientists, was found in the forests close to the capital city of Manaus. It had gone unnoticed during centuries of scientific studies because of its nocturnal habits and for living atop the tallest trees in undisturbed rainforests. The only hint of its existence remained in folklore, where its eerie song was attributed to a legend. Just imagine how many more such cases still wait to be uncovered.

And what about the curupira? Does it really exist? I don’t know the answer, of course, and perhaps never will, for that matter, since that’s not really my department. I know one thing, though; I like the idea that there is someone out there dedicating his life to protecting all the beings in the forest. I also know that I have never seen a hairy dwarf in the woods, let alone one with his feet on backwards. But I have heard the sound that many attribute to the curupira, and I know it’s made by a bird. Now, if this bird calls attention to the wonderful variety of plant and animal life that can be found in the Amazon rainforest - much of it still waiting to be studied adequately - and, in this manner, makes us more aware of the need to preserve the forest where such creatures dwell, then, in a sense, it is a curupira after all. Isn’t it?
(Translation Robert Rajabally)

*Story first published in 1999 in the Gazeta Mercantil of Manaus.