At an undefined time, I went on a jungle trip to the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve for 4 days. The trip itself was already special enough with Anacondas, Caymans, Sloths 6 different Monkey-species, plenty of insects, Scorpions, an awesome amount of birds and fishies. Anyway, on the very last night, my travel companion and I decided to go for an Ayuhasca session (which in itself is a long story, but I shan't go in to details here). Anyway, after a hard night with pretty much no sleep, at the morning hours, we heard a very weird sound, a bit like 4 or 5 short whistles starting from a sound with a higher note going stepwise down to lower notes and clearly in a sad fashion.
A few hours later, when our guide had woken up, I could finally ask him what this sound was and he told me the legend of the Ay Ay Ma Ma and it goes like this:
At a point in time, there were two brothers living with their father and his new wife somewhere in the jungle. The relationship with the mother in law was not a good one - she didn't like her stepsons at all. The father was out working deeper in the jungle for most of the days.
One day, the Stepmom took the two brothers to the forest in order to go meet the father, at least that's what she told them. When they got very far in to the forest, she told the boys to wait for her as she would be right back, however, as you might have guessed, she never returned, having planned to rid herself of the children all along.
The boys had been clever and along the way, had always dropped a bit of corn in order to find their way back, however, the amazon rainforest being full of different birds, the brothers had to find out that all of the corn had been eaten already and they were lost.
They started screaming out for their mother - Ay Ay Ma-Ma and over time, they slowly changed. Out of their skin grew feathers and slowly they changed in to birds, all the time screaming and searching for their stepmother - Ay Ay Ma-Ma.
Till this day, the brothers are still searching and this is why you can hear the sound of them in the amazon rainforest, now as birds, yelling for their mother - Ay Ay Ma-Ma.
Anyway, that is the story of the Ay Ay Ma-Ma (or the common Potoo) that we have been told on this very spacy morning, laying in hammocks after a rough night and looking out on the rivers of the rainforest.
We found afterwards that there is a lot of other stories depending on who you ask, so I will leave a link to some of those here and the video also has a short sound of the Ay Ay Ma Ma at the start.
Link to the youtube video (not mine and in Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvavRmkjqE
Also - isn't it funny that in all stories, Stepmoms are always bad?
