In many a Western cartoon film, a long-necked stork flies from far across the heavens with a little baby hanging from its long beak. If in the West the stork is the archetypical bringer of babies, for the aboriginal Bunun tribe of Taiwan the guardian spirit which protects their babies is the owl, and their belief in the bird's powers is as strong today as it has ever been.

Eighteen years ago, Chiu Mei-hui, who at that time was still a ticket girl with the Taiwan Motor Transport Corporation, went with a friend on a trip along the Southern Cross-Island Highway. There she met Ou Chien-hua, and the two fell in love at first sight. Ou loved the mountains, and after they married, Chiu left the plains and went to join her husband in a mountain settlement of the Bunun tribe.

Not long afterwards Chiu Mei-hui became pregnant with her first child. Because their home was surrounded by mountains, at night they would always hear the hooting of owls, and among the trees outside the house they would often see owls flying back and forth or perching. Later a neighbor, a Bunun woman, told Chiu Mei-hui that for the Bunun, the owl is the guardian spirit of children, and whenever a woman in a family is pregnant, there is certain to be an owl in the trees, flying back and forth and hooting.

A few years later, when Chiu Mei-hui was pregnant with her second and then her third child, owls also came and hooted over her house. Her neighbors would always tell her: "Last night I heard your owl hooting!" But what amazed her was that from the sound of the owl's hoot the Bunun could even tell whether the child would be a boy or a girl-her neighbors' predictions of the sex of her three children were all correct.

What Chiu Mei-hui likes most about the story of the owl is that although it is the Bunun's bird of good omen, the birds also protected this Han family, and did not leave until the babies were safely born.

Has your owl hooted?

Chiu Mei-hui and her husband live in Litao Village on the Southern Cross-Island Highway, at an elevation of just over 1000 meters. This Bunun village nestles on a little plateau surrounded by mountains of the Central Mountain Range. Walking through this hamlet of 50-odd families and 300-odd people, if you ask: "Do you know the story of the owl?" almost all the villagers can speak of some experience to do with the birds. Fifty-six-year-old Bunun woman Yu Niang-mei says that when she and her eight brothers and sisters were small, their mother always told them: "You mustn't ever hurt, kill or eat owls." Every time their mother was pregnant with one of them, an owl always flew close by.

Because they formerly lacked written languages, Taiwan's native peoples, who have long lived in the natural environment of the mountain forests, mostly relied on family memories and word-of-mouth transmission among tribe members to pass on knowledge of their own history and culture.

With the help of Fang Yu-shui, a Bunun, recently Yushan National Park recorded the oral reminiscences of old tribe members in the book Bunun. The book recounts Bunun legends, myths and everyday customs, and includes many legends about birds. For instance, in the far-off days of the great flood, the black bulbul, whose completely black plumage emphasizes the bright red color of its beak, flew over the mountains to bring back glowing coals in its beak, giving the tribespeople fire with which to warm themselves and cook food to eat, so that they could continue to survive.

Bunun makes no special mention of owls, but Fang Yu-shui, who is a technician at Yushan National Park's Tatachia Visitor Center, says that owls symbolize good fortune in Bunun people's lives, and the stories about them are firmly believed to this day.

Speaking from his own experience, Fang Yu-shui says that before he knew his wife was pregnant, one day he went with her to Kuankao to clear grass from the paths. There they heard the hoot of a collared scops owl. After they returned home he took his wife to the clinic for a test, and indeed found that she was pregnant. However, Fang Yu-shui says that when his wife was pregnant with their second and third children, they did not see owls again. Thus he believes that owls do not necessarily come every time, but if one does hear an owl close to one's home, it's a sure sign that someone in the family has "good news." He says with a laugh: "Our later children didn't need the owls, we used ultrasound scanners."

The Bunun's ultrasound scanner

Predicting the arrival of children is not the only "special ability" which the owls possess. From the owls' behavior, some Bunun can also judge the state of the fetus' health.

Hu Chin-nan of the Bunun Cultural History Workshop lives in Yenping Rural Township in Taitung County. He says that once he heard an owl hoot close to his home. He took his wife to be examined, and she was a month pregnant. He even bet her the child would be a boy. From the beginning of his wife's pregnancy this owl stayed near their house, but in the fifth month it flew away. Hu sensed something must be wrong with the baby, so he took his wife to the clinic for a checkup. The doctor diagnosed that Hu's wife had low blood sugar, which in severe cases could lead to medical shock and cause the fetus to die in the womb. After a course of treatment by dietary control, in the sixth month the owl flew back again.

But how do Bunun people judge the sex of a baby from the owl's hoot?

"A strong, deep hoot means a boy; a harsh, shrill hoot means a girl," says Hu Chin-nan, adding that if the hoot ends with a rasping noise, the girl will be talkative.

Tian Ya-ke, director of the government health station in Kaohsiung County's Taoyuan Rural Township, got married three years ago. He described his feelings while looking forward to having children in his essay "Days Awaiting the Owl." Not long after Tian Ya-ke and his wife were married, for many nights he sat on the lawn outside their house watching the Chinese parasol trees on the distant slopes of the mountain opposite, quietly awaiting the "melody" of the owls.

However, Tian Ya-ke's attempt to distinguish the owl's call went slightly awry. He identified a "girlish niu-niu, niu-niu sound," so he concluded the child would be a girl. But his mother said the owl was not coming to their home, but to the neighbors', 100 meters away. Sure enough, the old lady proved right: the neighbors had a girl, while Tian's wife gave birth to a boy.

Days awaiting the owl

Tian Ya-ke has reproduced one of his tribespeople's stories about the owl in the form of a short story. A young Bunun man, Masaowu, goes to his family's hunting grounds to hunt. He stays in the forest a day and a night, but only finds a few mushrooms. Disappointed, he goes to a Formosan koa tree near his house, and shouts out loudly to show that he is coming home safely. But to his surprise there is a sudden rustling movement under the tree, and a large bird which he has startled flies into the branches of another tree, where it huddles up into a ball.

With movements as nimble and quick as those of a ravenous hunting dog, Masaowu steadies himself, stretches his bow and looses an arrow at the bird. Before the twang of his bowstring has died away, the bird's heavy body plummets straight down beside the tree trunk. Masaowu hurries across to pick up the bird, and with chest thrust forward he sets off for home, whistling as he goes. That night, he and his wife enjoy a feast of mushrooms and bird meat along with their millet.

But when the moon has passed its apogee in the sky and is slowly slanting down towards the west, Masaowu's wife Abusi wakes up drenched in cold sweat, with a pain in her lower belly.

As soon as it is light, the couple anxiously hurry to seek out the shaman. After listening to their story, the shaman, stern-faced, rebukes them, saying: "The owl is an auspicious bird which protects infants." At Abusi he shouts even louder that she should not have eaten owl meat. Abusi and Masaowu realize that they have done a great wrong, and have lost their unborn child. Following the shaman's instructions, they return home and perform a ceremony of repentance.

A year later, there is still no sign of Abusi becoming pregnant again, and the two once more go to consult the shaman. The shaman is moved by their sincerity, and to drive the impediment to conception out of Abusi's body he carefully brushes her all over with cogon grass. Then he tells them to go home and wait.

Awakening early one morning, Masaowu says excitedly to Abusi that he plans to go to a nearby village to find an orphaned child with no family, for he believes this is the way which heaven has chosen for him to have a child. Masaowu crosses two mountains, and comes to village which has been raided by another tribe. There he sees Youhani, a newborn baby whose mother and father were both killed in the attack. With the agreement of the village elders, Masaowu takes Youhani back with him to bring up as his own son.

Many moons later, when Youhani has grown as tall as Masaowu's bellybutton, one day he is so busy playing that he comes home late. Not daring to enter the house, he hides under a tree outside the garden. The heavy darkness of the night fills Youhani with fear. Suddenly a bird call comes from the tree. Youhani pokes his head out to look, just at the right moment to be spotted by Masaowu, who is coming out to look for him. Youhani points up at the bird in the tree, and Masaowu finally sees the bird of good omen for which he has waited so long. The shadow which has lain over his heart is cleared away by the owl's hoot.

All things in nature are for man's use

On the other hand, Hu Chin-nan of the Bunun Cultural History Workshop has collected a modern story about transgressing the taboo against harming owls. A 70-year-old tribal shaman told Hu that when he was young, in a fit of anger after an argument with his wife, he shot an owl. Not long afterwards their cow began pulling madly at the plow in the field, and butted his wife's belly. From then on she could not bear children, and the couple remained childless all their lives.

According to the Bunun, says Hu Chin-nan, "a shaman should have even greater respect for tribal customs, so if he acts disrespectfully towards the owls he will be punished more severely than others."

Living constantly in the bosom of nature, Taiwan's native peoples have always had a great respect for natural phenomena, and many aboriginal groups have a tradition of divining the future from the direction of flight of different bird species. But Hu Chin-nan stresses that the significance of the owls' hoot is different from "bird divination." Bird divination predicts the outcome, good or bad, of tribe members' various endeavors such as hunting, planting or house-building; but the owl is purely a symbol of good news.

Sun Yuan-hsun, a biologist who has researched the tawny fish owl, says that there are many differences between the owl legends of different aboriginal peoples. For instance, when the aboriginals of Lanyu (Orchid Island) off Taiwan's southeast coast see the island's endemic Lanyu scops owl, it is the same as seeing a crow for the Han Chinese: it presages ill fortune. But the Atayal of Wulai in northern Taiwan regard the owls as the reincarnation of their ancestors. When Sun Yuan-hsun was studying in the USA, a classmate from Botswana told him that his people believed that to see an owl in the daytime was unlucky. Perhaps this was because owls are nocturnal birds and do not normally hunt in the daytime, so to see them by day is unusual.

So why should one be able to judge the sex of unborn children from the owl's hoot? Hu Chin-nan opines that there is no answer to this question, and no explanation. "If you ask the old folk, they say that's just the way it is."

Huang Ying-kui, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of Ethnology, has visited all the Bunun tribal villages in the course of his research. In his experience, "owl stories are very widespread." As for why the Bunun believe that different owl hoots are a reliable way of judging the sex of unborn children, in Huang's view: "As with all myths and legends, the inaccurate instances are forgotten. In psychology, this is called selective memory." Thus only the stories in which the prediction comes true are passed down.

Sun Yuan-hsun says that when owls are courting, the male and female birds make different calls, but no-one has done empirical research to determine whether owls really can tell the sex of a baby. He believes this is "a question of probabilities": babies come in only two genders, and perhaps when by coincidence Bunun who had heard the shrill cry of the owl gave birth to girls, they associated these two events in their minds.

Sun goes on to say that when his wife was pregnant she went for several ultrasound scans, and the doctor always said the child was a girl; but after a scan shortly before she gave birth he changed his mind and said it was a boy. Yet when the child was born it was a girl after all. It looks as though the cold, unfeeling ultrasound scanner is no more accurate than the hoot of the owl, so Sun suggests that large hospitals might try planting a few trees in their grounds to attract some owls-perhaps in this way they could save some costs.

But Bunun tribe member Hu Chin-nan says: "Animals have powers which human wisdom is unable to explain. If you insist on explaining it from a scientific point of view, the mother is a large magnetic field, and animals are especially sensitive to magnetic fields!"

p.55

Litao is a Bunun village in Taitung County on the Southern Cross-Island Highway. The Bunun believe that whenever an owl is heard hooting, it is a sure sign that a woman living close by is pregnant. The picture at left (photo by Liang Chieh-te) shows a collared scops owl.p.57

Chiu Mei-hui and her husband run a store in Litao. When Chiu was pregnant,

her neighbors were always telling her,

"I heard your owl hoot last night!"

p.58

From the sound of the owl's hoot, the Bunun can judge the sex of the unborn baby. A powerful hoot means a boy, while a shrill hoot presages a girl.

p.60

In taxonomic terms, owls

comprise the order Strigiformes.

Bird guides describe them as "noct-

urnal predators"-when night falls and

the stars appear, their day's activity is just

beginning. "The owls remain hidden by day,

but under the stars of the midsummer sky, on a

dark stage they play with kingly demeanor a sym-phonic movement which is an integral part of the island night." In the mind of painter He Hua-jen, who has long made birds the subject of his art, Taiwan's night is not the domain of urban humans.

Lanyu scops owl (Otus elegans botelensis)

Spotted scops owl

(Otus spilocephalus)

Tawny fish-owl

(Ketupa flavipes)

Long-eared owl

(Asio otus)

Collared scops owl

(Otus bakkamoena)

(text Chang Ching-ju/art courtesy of He Hua-jen)

From the sound of the owl's hoot, the Bunun can judge the sex of the unborn baby. A powerful hoot means a boy, while a shrill hoot presages a girl.

Lanyu scops owl （Otus elegans botelensis） Spotted scops owl （Otus spilocephalus） Tawny fish-owl （ketupa flavipes） Long-eared owl （Asio otus） Collared scops owl （Otus bakkamoena） （text Chang Ching-ju／art courtesy of He Hua-jen）