Guardians of the Night: The Secret Life of Sri Lanka's Frogmouth

When dusk falls across the rain-soaked forests of Sinharaja, a low, rasping call echoes through the canopy—neither frog nor owl, but something eerily in between. It belongs to the Sri Lanka Frogmouth (Batrachostomus moniliger), one of the most secretive birds ever to inhabit the island's forests. Its strange croak seems to rise from the mist itself — an ancient whisper from the treetops.

- BY IFHAM NIZAM

For Suranjan Karunaratne, an ecologist with the Nature Explorations and Education Team, this haunting sound became a lifelong fascination.

Speaking to The Island, he said: “It was like finding a ghost in the forest,” he recalls. “The bird was perched motionless, its feathers blending so perfectly with the bark that even my camera couldn't distinguish it from a branch.”

That “ghost” became the subject of Sri Lanka's first comprehensive, 20-year study on the species — research that has redefined what we know about one of Asia's most enigmatic nocturnal birds.

A Two-Decade Search for Shadows

Between 1998 and 2018, Karunaratne and his collaborators traversed the length and breadth of the island — from the misty lowlands of Sinharaja to the scrublands of Yala and the arid forests of Hambantota. Their work, recently published in Ardeola, the journal of the Spanish Ornithological Society, mapped the distribution, habitat associations, and conservation status of the Sri Lanka Frogmouth with unprecedented precision.

The project brought together a powerhouse team of Sri Lankan and international researchers, including Salindra K. Dayananda, Dinesh Gabadage, Madhava Botejue, Majintha Madawala, Indika Peabotuwage, Buddhika Madurapperuma, Manjula Ranagalage, Asanka Udayakumara, and Prof. Thilina Surasinghe, who led the modelling work from Bridgewater State University, USA.

“This was no short-term study,” Karunaratne says proudly. “It took years of patient night work — sometimes returning from the field at 2 a.m., drenched, bitten by leeches, but exhilarated by a single call.”

A Forest Specialist