March 21, 2018

birding in sri lanka

(Weddagala, Sri Lanka)...Our November 2017 trip to Sri Lanka was to have been divided neatly into two parts roughly measuring a week each. The first week largely was a week of adventure, travelling in the Hill Country near Hatton and then visiting the last pristine piece of rain forest on the island, Sinharaja; the second week was due to have been one of relaxation on a beach supposedly mirroring the cliché of a tropical Indian Island paradise from a glossy pamphlet.
It all sort of went that way, just with a lot of rain thrown in, including Cyclone Ockhi, which saw almost 250 fatalities, some 220 in India and 30 in Lanka. At the last count, more than 550 fishermen remained missing. For us, it was an interesting inconvenience, with our gracious hosts at the Little Tamarind guest house moving us to a lower room for the night. We had been to the Portuguese-Dutch walled city of Galle that day, and we had some sunshine, but on the way back near Mirissa and its fish market the palm trees started bending and the waves became a little more boisterous, not that anything seemed to bother the locals, even though this of course was exactly the same area that was utterly destroyed by the tsunami in 2004 that saw the demise of more than 5,000 people.
For three days a week before that we had spent all day with birding outfitter Walk with Jith and guides Tili and Tila, who genuinely are just as excited as their clients when they see birds, and presumably they have seen them all numerous times. The Land Rover journey from the village of Weddagala is a bumpy, bone-rattling affair made more endurable by the idea that it kept civilisation firmly at bay. We had hardly met the guides when they rushed us up to some unmarked but remembered spot to trek into the undergrowth, across rivulets, over rocks and under fronds for 300 or so metres to see a Serendib scops-owl (Otus thilohoffmanni), a species seen for the first time in 2001. That is rather remarkable on what is a relatively small island. The birds had been located that morning, so it was that afternoon or nothing. Two sat looking at us, a species that had not been gazed upon in any period of history until I was 35. Other avian highlights in the forest included the gorgeous Blue magpie (Urocissa ornate; on lots of tourist handouts, too), Red-faced malkoha (Phaenicophaeus pyrrhocephalus), Green-billed coucal (Centropus chlororhynchos), Sri Lanka spurfowl (Galloperdix bicalcarata) and the very elusive Scaly thrush (Zoothera imbricata). Also seen was the country's national bird, the Sri Lanka junglefowl, the ancestor of the farmyard chicken, just a little more colourful.
Back in the capital Colombo we walked through Slave Town when the rain fell again. Seeking shelter in a betting shop, which I was amused are still called turf accountants here, as they were in the England of my youth, I watched a screen showing greyhound racing from Crayford Stadium, which is 100 metres from where my Nanna Barton lived. In the 1970s and 80s when I used to stay over on Friday nights, usually to get up early to take a train somewhere in the United Kingdom to meet my parents on holiday, I used to fall asleep to the sound of scramble motorbikes or banger cars racing around this stadium. Today the only action is the dogs.

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