Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part five: 2016-2017

Try "no European zoos now keep it"

 

my flight out of Sri Lanka (on 11 December) is to Madurai in southern India. In terms of primates, down there I'm aiming for bonnet macaque, lion-tailed macaque, Nilgiri langur and black-footed langur (that last one is one of the group formerly all lumped into entellus/hanuman/grey langur, whichever name you prefer).

 

Very much agreed; I suspect a major factor behind their disappearance was that collections saw little point in keeping the species going when it is very easy to obtain something easier to look after such as the Red Junglefowl.The last few public collections with the species all went out of the species in the last 5 years or so, with the very last one ceasing to keep the species earlier this year.

Definitely one I hope pops up again *somewhere* down thhe line......

 

I've seen three of the species (still missing the grey junglefowl). The Sri Lankan ones are gorgeous! I'm not sure if they are more gorgeous than green junglefowl but think I'm tending towards preferring Sri Lankan junglefowl the most.

 

as of today I'm on 23 mammal species for Sri Lanka. About 15 or 16 were new species (i.e. ones I hadn't seen in the wild before). One was a species of horseshoe bat which I haven't identified yet because I hadn't had any internet for a while until yesterday.

 

I had only given myself one day for Wilpattu National Park (so two nights at Wilpattu House) because I knew the costs would be too high for more than that. So on my third Sri Lankan morning we caught a bus back to Puttalam. Mariana was heading for Kandy and then on to the Central Highlands, while I was heading for Sigiriya which has the same dry-zone ecosystem as at Wilpattu but where you can walk in the forest. For both places the bus from Puttalam stops in Kurunegala, a travel-time of about three hours, and then from there she could get a direct bus to Kandy and I could get one to Dambulla and then to Sigiriya. But by the time we got to Kurunegala it was already well into the afternoon (we had left quite late) so I ended up just going to Kandy with her as it was a shorter distance.

Sereno had pre-warned us that in Sri Lanka you really can't just get off a bus and find a cheap guesthouse. Firstly there are all the tuktuk touts swarming you with probably-dodgy promises of cheap accommodation, but more importantly the Sri Lankan towns are so spread-out that if trying to just walk from hotel to hotel to find an acceptable price you'll end up walking for tens of kilometres - and you probably won't find anything for less than NZ$15 or $20 anyway. The necessary thing to do, he told us, was to book ahead online (booking. com seems to be the go-to site in Sri Lanka) or at least use the booking sites to find the cheaper places and ring them directly to book. Now this is not the way I travel, and as it turned out not the way Mariana liked to travel either. We like just arriving and then seeing what is there, not booking something sight-unseen and then finding out too late that it is a front for a cannibal cult or that there is a guesthouse two doors down which is half the price. So we decided to do that for Kandy - arrive and wing it.

The road through the hills to Kandy is lined with villages. They all just sort of merge one to the next, but they all have separate names. Most have at least one aquarium shop, which is interesting. One had a combined electronics shop-aquarium, because if there's anything thing that mixes well it is electronics and water. The main thing to mention, however, is that all these villages seem to just be strips along the highway, hemmed to the road by the hills behind. And the hotels and guesthouses were strung randomly along the road, each separated by hundreds of metres to one or two kilometres. Things were not looking good.

We arrived at the Kandy bus stand (like India the bus stations are called bus stands, because that is where the buses stand while loading up). We were immediately beset by tuktuk drivers. One guy said he could take us to a hotel which was 2000 LKR which was all right as it would be 1000 each. I have a "theory" - not really a theory at all, just an observation - that every bus station in Asia has at least one cheap hotel right next door. That usually suits me because I'm often just passing through cities and towns. But Mariana wanted to be near the Kandy lake, around which the main town is situated, and she was going to be there a few days, so we went with the tuktuk guy. As may be expected the place he took us did not have a 2000 LKR room. Because we had arranged a fare to take us to the hotel on the promise of a 2000 LKR room, we made him drive us around a bunch more hotels for no extra money until we found one for 2000 (the Fortuna Heritage Hotel).

The conversation between myself and the hotel owner would always go something like this:
Me: "how much is your cheapest room? It needs to be 2000."
Them: "come look at the room."
Me: "how much is it?"
Them: "come look at the room."
Me: "how much is it?"
Them: "just come look at the room."
Me: "How. Much. Is. It?"
Them: "2000 rupees. Come look at it."
Me: "it is 2000 rupees?"
Them: "we have already discussed the price. Now, you come look at the room."
We would go look at the room. Perfectly ordinary room.
Me: "so this is 2000 rupees?"
Them: "no, this is 6000."
Me: (turn around and walk out)

The Fortuna Heritage was right beside Kandy lake. The lake is reasonably large, completely encircled by a road and pedestrian walkway and a line of trees. To my surprise the trees were home to a large colony of Indian fruit bats. We had got to Kandy in the late afternoon, so when we came back out of the hotel to go find some food the bats were all heaving themselves into the darkening sky and flapping off to feed in the forest. Flying foxes leaving their roosts at night is always a sight worth seeing.

The next morning I got onto booking. com and noted the phone numbers for the cheapest places I could find for my next few stops, and also booked a place at Sigiriya for that night.

David Brown Shoe Fauna Alert #1
In the morning, after internetting and packing up my stuff to head off to Sigiriya, I went to put on my boots, which I had left outside the door to the room. As always, being a proper jungle-boy even in the cities, I banged the first boot on the ground and shook it out. Empty (they usually are!). After that boot was on I picked up the other boot, bang, shake, empty. It was a bit dim in the corridor, but there was something large and black on the floor where my boot had been standing. I thought it was a dead leaf off the sole of the boot, gave it a nudge, and it put out its pincers and flicked its tail into the air. It was a scorpion about the size of my thumb. Technically it was just Under Shoe Fauna, but it is close enough.

 

From the Kandy bus stand I caught a bus three hours north to a town called Dambulla. This dropped me by the roadside in town where a series of tuktuk drivers told me that it was very very far to Sigiriya, and especially to the place I was staying, the Bandulla Homestay (the cheapest place I could find in Sigiriya, at 1350 LKR a night), but they could take me there for 1000 rupees. Instead I got something to eat and then got on the first Dambulla-Sigiriya bus which passed by. This takes an hour and costs 35 rupees (although I didn't know this and got charged 50 rupees). This bus dropped me at another roadside in Sigiriya Village, but about 4km from where I needed to be. As it turned out, the place they dropped me (and a couple of other tourists) was outside a hotel which paid a commission to the bus drivers to leave tourists outside, no matter where they actually wanted to go. I went over to a nearby shop to get a tuktuk, but the owner of the shop just rang up the Bandulla Homestay for me and the owner (whose name is Bandulla) came and got me for free in his own tuktuk.

I really liked the Bandulla Homestay a lot. It is most definitely where I would recommend staying if going to Sigiriya. The price is probably the best in town, the rooms are good and clean (there are only three), the food is really good (but you have to order meals in advance to be sure; breakfast is free though), and the owner is super-helpful. The only thing I can think of that could be considered a downside is that the homestay is maybe 1.5km from the bus stop (i.e. where the bus is meant to drop you off!). The start of the road leading to the Sigiriya and Pidurangala rocks is also at the bus stop. Sigiriya is very spread-out though, so where-ever your accommodation you're either going to be walking a lot or using tuktuks or bicycles.

Sigiriya is famous for just one thing, Sigiriya Rock (the Lion Rock). Tourists flock there to climb to the top because the guidebooks say that is what you have to do as a tourist. There's another rock close by called Pidurangala which fewer people climb, because it isn't promoted as much by the guidebooks. Both rocks are part of an ancient fortress and temple complex. The Sigiriya Rock and its moated fortress is a World Heritage Site and costs US$30 to enter and climb (or, if you're a local, 50 rupees). Pidurangala costs 500 rupees to climb for tourists. I climbed neither - my time was spent looking for birds and monkeys in the forests and fields which surround the rocks - but I looked from afar upon the Sigiriya Rock and at any time of day there was a literal queue of people leading up the metal staircase to the top. The guy in the room next to mine climbed it and said it wasn't even really a climb because you were moving so slowly, just a couple of steps at a time as the queue inched upwards. A German girl and her mother in the room on the other side of me didn't climb the rocks, but hired bicycles and rode round exploring the area; they were kind of annoyed that their guidebook only talked about the Sigiriya Rock when there was so much else there, and so many other ruins left completely unremarked-upon.

It was around 1pm when I arrived at Sigiriya, so I just went for a wander along the road leading to the rocks. I didn't get all that far (birding can be slow-moving). At the bus stop junction there's a giant pond/small lake covered in lotus, so I spent a bit of time there picking out birds from amongst the plants. I saw some cinnamon bitterns there this first day but not on the days after that (but they are secretive little things). Otherwise there were usually pheasant-tailed jacanas, common kingfishers, various egrets, purple gallinules, and lesser whistling ducks. Continuing on, I found various small passerines in the trees along the road including common ioras, the males of the Sri Lankan subspecies having black head and back, totally unlike any others I've seen elsewhere (I didn't even recognise the males as being common ioras).

The best bird encountered along here, only a couple of hundred metres along the road from the bus stop, was a pair of grey hornbills. There are only two hornbills in Sri Lanka. The Malabar pied hornbill is also found in southern India (I saw these at Wilpattu, and then later here at Sigiriya too) - these are your typical big black-and-white hornbills with huge casques on their beaks. The grey hornbill, on the other hand, is endemic (so endemic bird number three, on day number four), quite small and has no casque. When I saw the first one fly into a tree I thought it was a treepie, which gives an idea of its size. If you imagine the difference between a trumpeter hornbill and a red-billed hornbill, it's probably something like that. I have had a recent habit of saying certain "new" animals are the best-looking of their kind - the woolly hare in Ladakh is the best-looking hare, the Sri Lankan junglefowl is the best-looking junglefowl - and I'll do the same for the grey hornbill. They aren't colourful but they are the best-looking hornbill I've seen. There's just something about their appearance and demeanour. They don't act like other Asian hornbills either. The ones I saw the first day weren't doing much, just sitting pretty still, occasionally moving between the branches. I saw them around the same place the next couple of days and got to watch them quite a bit. What they were actually doing was looking for insects. The bird would sit silently in one spot, twisting its head slowly in circles, then suddenly flap out into mid-air in a sort of heavy hover, grab an insect from a leaf and thump back down onto the perch. In effect it was a hornbill acting like a trogon or forest bee-eater.

Endemic bird number four was also seen this same afternoon, nearing dusk, when a noisy party of brown-capped babblers swarmed through the undergrowth. Their common name doesn't make them sound that interesting but they are quite bright in colour, sort of orange, and they have a lot of character.

There are a lot of nocturnal mammals around Sigiriya, including four species of cats, jackals, grey slender loris, mouse deer... and elephants. The elephants are the problem if you are going solo and not on one of the expensive mammal-watching tours. You don't see the elephants during the day, they are back in the forest resting, but at night they come out along the roads and around the ruins to feed, and they are supposed to be particularly rambunctious in this area. And by rambunctious I mean lethal. I'm not sure how dangerous they really are here, but the warnings are commonplace. What I did notice was that all the way along the road towards the rocks there was an electric fence to stop the elephants coming down from one side of the road towards the village lake. The fence was made up of only three strands of wire, and the bottom one was a couple of feet off the ground, easily enough room to get under quickly if out at night and meeting an elephant coming down the road. So my plan was to just go out spotlighting and hope for the best - and if I did meet an elephant or two, get to the other side of the fence and hope the elephants were actually deterred by the shock. That was the plan, but it bucketed down with rain that first night which meant no spotlighting.

I had asked Bandulla if I could get breakfast at 6.30am in order to be done and away for early-morning birding in the forest. No problem, he had said. I got breakfast at 7.30am. Oh well. Walking along the village road towards the forest I saw a Sri Lankan woodshrike in someone's garden. Endemic number five, on day number five. The woodshrikes turned out to be very common all over Sigiriya. Another interesting bird seen here, and later in the forest, was a lesser goldenback woodpecker. I've seen these in India, but the Sri Lankan subspecies has a bright crimson back and looks completely different. Passing the lake and on round the road towards the rocks, I made a little detour into a dead-end track I had found yesterday which was where I had found the brown-capped babblers. Those babblers weren't there but I saw another nice babbler, the dark-fronted babbler (restricted to Sri Lanka and the Western Ghats in southern India) and my sixth endemic, the black-capped bulbul. Earlier when I said there were 33 endemic birds in Sri Lanka, this does of course depend on how one treats certain splits and lumps. The Sri Lankan woodshrike may be treated as a subspecies of the common woodshrike, and the black-capped bulbul is a split from the black-crested bulbul of the rest of Asia (and so the black-capped bulbul retains the scientific name of Pycnonotus melanicterus while all the others get changed to P. flaviventris).

I spent the day just wandering, up and down any dirt roads I came across. Luckily it didn't rain at all apart for some light spitting which didn't even require standing under a tree. This was the first day in Sri Lanka where I hadn't had rain. Most of the birds were repeats from previous days here or at Wilpattu, but some new additions for the trip were black-headed cuckoo-shrike, Blyth's reed warbler and Asian palm swift. The white morph of the paradise-flycatcher is pretty common in northern Sri Lanka too, it seems. I finally managed to see an alexandrine parakeet here as well. I had been hearing them all day, clearly different calls from the ubiquitous Indian ringneck, but whenever I tried to see them I could only find ringnecks. Eventually one perched at the top of a bare tree and I got a good enough look at it.

I found a great restaurant exactly mid-way on the dirt road leading between the two rocks, at the Hotel Thal Sewana. The rooms are a bit expensive for me (around 4000 LKR) but they were really nice and if your only reason for visiting Sigiriya is to climb the rocks then it really has the perfect location. You'd need to get there by tuktuk from the bus stop, but once there Pidurangala is about five minutes walk and Sigiriya Rock maybe twenty minutes (because you need to walk around the perimeter of the moat - which has mugger crocodiles in it, just as an aside).

Because there had been no rain all day and it still looked clear for the evening I was going to go out spotlighting. But when I came back from dinner the guy in the room next to mine said he had eaten at a restaurant from where night safaris were organised and did I want to go out on one with him. I hadn't even known they did night safaris at Sigiriya - I'd only heard about the actual mammal-watching tour groups doing them - so of course I said yes. It was 5500 LKR for two people (roughly NZ$27 each) and they went out for four hours. This was a surprisingly long time, given that commercial night drives usually only go for an hour or so, but I wasn't complaining. It turned out the reason they were so long was because they weren't driving around Sigiriya itself but on the roads near the Kaudulla National Park some distance away. The difference between spotlighting on foot and from a vehicle is one of those 50-50 things. On foot you can see more smaller animals (potentially at least) and you can go along forest trails, but you can't travel far; from a vehicle you are really looking for larger mammals (here the emphasis is on elephants) but you cover a lot of ground so there's all sorts of things you could see. Apart for the mammal lifers for me which I'll talk about below, we saw chital, "wild buffalo" (either feral water buffalo or roaming domestic stock, I'm not convinced on which), and elephants. The elephants were cool, first was a small group of females and babies, and then a youngish bull feeding right at the roadside. It was pretty amazing watching them casually sauntering across the highway, backlit by the headlights of the vehicles stopping to let them cross.

The drive started at around 9.30pm, because it was organised last-minute. There were numerous frustrations for me along the way but I did see a couple of new species, so it's all good. The first mammal we saw was something small, like the size of a rusty-spotted cat, dashing across the road into thick undergrowth so the truck didn't even stop. The second was something larger, with a similar result (the spotlight-guy who was in the back with us said it was a deer, so presumably a muntjac, but I didn't really trust his judgement). The third mammal I actually got to see, and it was a new one for me, a black-naped hare. The spotlight-guy said "Wild rabbit. This is wild rabbit. Here only this colour. In other countries is other colours, like white or black."

Once we left the vicinity of Sigiriya the roadsides turned to open grassland with scattered trees or shrubs. I had brought my torch which was more powerful than the truck spotlight, so he scanned one side of the road while I did the other. This was where my frustrations started. Because we were covering a lot of ground the truck was travelling fast. When eye-shine was spotted, the spotlight-guy would yell at the driver, he would slam on his brakes, by the time he stopped we would be at least fifty metres along the road, then he would reverse while the spotlight-guy kept yelling and yelling and yelling to direct him. Not surprisingly anything which had been spotted near the road was long gone by the time we were back to where it had been seen. A lot of the time even the larger animals well back from the road, like chital, would have run off by then. There were five or six animals which we never got to see because of this, but I have no clue what they would have been because the spotlight-guy didn't know what they were called in English except one was "Deer, like deer but very small, but is deer" (i.e. a mouse deer).

With that said, we did see one other small mammal apart for the hare, but that was only because it was seen in the middle of a stretch of grassland and so was still departing when I got onto it with my binoculars. Even with the naked eye, under the spotlight, I could see it was a rusty-spotted cat just from its size. This is the smallest wild cat in the world, only the size of a very small domestic cat. At the time I couldn't help thinking it looked like a cat the size of a mongoose as it scooted through the grass. We lost it for a minute, then picked up the eye-shine again, and that's when I got my binoculars onto it and got a reasonable look as it bounded away and disappeared.

I had planned on leaving Sigiriya the following morning (after two nights) but there was still one monkey I hadn't seen yet. There are only three monkey species in Sri Lanka. I had seen the toque macaques and tufted grey langurs at Wilpattu and here at Sigiriya. They are both really common but the grey langurs are pretty skittish and I couldn't get photos of them. The third monkey is the endemic purple-faced langur. It is found all over Sri Lanka and is divided into several races. In the north you have the dry-zone langur, in the south the wet-zone langur, in the west the critically-endangered western langur, and in the highlands the montane langur (also called the bear monkey for its thick fur). I was bound to see purple-faced langurs at some point on the trip but I wanted to try and see all the subspecies for comparisons in appearance, and so I extended my stay by one more night to keep trying the next day.

This extra day worked out perfectly. In the morning, along the same paved road I took every day towards the rocks, I found two purple-faced langurs sitting in a tree with a tufted grey langur. I had just seen some toque macaques near the village, so this was a three-monkey day. The purple-faced and grey langurs don't look much like each other and if you see them well there's no confusion, but if you have a group of monkeys back amongst the trees, moving quickly through the canopy, sometimes it can be hard to tell what they are. So it was good to be able to see both langur species sitting almost side-by-side in an open tree and not have to be thinking "well maybe those were purple-faced langurs..."

Later in the morning I found a dozen crimson-fronted barbets bouncing around in a fig tree (endemic bird number seven on day number six). In the afternoon the best birds were a superb pair of Jacobin cuckoos, named for their contrasting black and white plumage. In the late afternoon back near the village I had my first Sri Lankan bird-wave with twelve species, including new trip-birds Jerdon's leafbird and Tickell's blue flycatcher (the first one also a lifer).

Today was a good reptile day as well. I saved a star tortoise which was my good deed for the year and justified staying the extra day. I had been walking for several kilometres through an apparently-endless village beyond the forest. It didn't seem to be going anywhere except more village so I turned back. On the return there was the tortoise crossing the road. He wasn't moving very fast, because he was a tortoise. A motorbike went past and the tortoise plonked itself down inside its shell and just sat there. I was already on my way to move him, of course, and took him off to the side before he got hit by a bus or something. I waited for him to emerge and took a few photos as he trundled off into the undergrowth. Then there were a couple of nice agama lizards. One was a male Calotes calotes sitting on top of a bush, with a dark banded body and a bright crimson head. The other was a small brown one with long hind legs which appears to run upright like a frilled dragon (not sure what that one was yet, maybe just young Calotes). You often see them shooting across the roads.

I had planned on going out spotlighting on my final night, hopefully without meeting any killer elephants, but the rain arrived in the evening so that didn't happen. The rain did bring out swarms of flying termites to freak out the other tourists though, so that was cool.

 

I have seen five species now. Leopard cat in a couple of countries; flat-headed cat in Borneo; tiger in Assam; and in Sri Lanka I have seen rusty-spotted cat and leopard (that last one hasn't made an appearance in the thread yet though).

 

better than there being no animals, that's for sure!

I quite like Sri Lanka, apart for yesterday which went a bit sour (I'll come to that in time). I think it is like a better version of India really. Southern India may be quite like Sri Lanka though. Mostly the people are great, the animals are great, the prices for some things not so great. Even the dogs are friendly.

 

Very pleased indeed to hear you successfully saw my favourite primate species!

 

Just south of Sigiriya is a town called Dambulla. I had passed through here on my way from Kandy to Sigiriya, and now I was going back. This time I was stopping overnight for a very good reason called loris. Slender loris to be precise. Grey slender loris to be even more precise.

Apart for the three monkeys I talked about previously, Sri Lanka has two more primate species. The grey slender loris is the more widespread of the two, being also found in southern India. The second one is the red slender loris, found only in Sri Lanka. I would very much like to see a slender loris. One of the species would be great, both of them would be even better. Unfortunately, lorises in general are something of my nemeses. I spend a lot of time looking for them and very little time finding them. So far I have only seen Bornean slow loris once (in 2014) and Sunda slow loris once (a pair of animals this year). The odds wouldn't exactly be in my favour if a person were to be betting on me seeing slender loris: but better to fail than not try at all is my motto.

The ace up my sleeve was the 36-acre Popham Arboretum. This was started in the 1960s by a British man named Sam Popham and has long been Loris Central. Despite the connotations of the name "Arboretum" almost all the trees here are the result of natural regeneration rather than it being a planted garden. There are some mangoes and other older trees from when the land was a farm, but otherwise it is a naturally-regrown forest. Sadly it is now basically an island of forest, surrounded by cultivation and settlement. In the 1990s it was possible to see 20-plus loris in one night here, when there was forest and scrub surrounding the property; now it is more like 4 or 5 a night. Still, it is a reliable loris-finding site and my hopes were high. Or, at least, not too low.

Apart for being able to spotlight in the forest here, there are also a couple of rooms which means you're right in the forest. There are some cheaper hotels along the road, nothing too close, but staying elsewhere means you then have tuktuk costs and if coming in from outside you are restricted to doing a night tour rather than being able to go alone. The manager's name is Jayantha Amarasinghe and I had found his phone number somewhere on the internet (077 726 7951 if anyone reading this needs it). I gave him a call from Sigiriya the night before and arranged a room. One room is 3000 LKR and the other 2500 but he let me have it for 2000.

From Sigiriya I caught a morning bus to Dambulla and then got a tuktuk the rest of the way for 300 LKR. There is a much cheaper way which I found out once there. Whether coming from Kandy or Sigiriya just ask the bus to drop you at the Kandalama Junction then get one of the regular local buses which run along the Kandalama Road for only 10 LKR (or from the Dambulla bus stand it will cost 20 LKR). Popham is pronounced "poppim" and Arboretum has to be pronounced the Sri Lankan way with the stress on the very first syllable and with a hard e not a long e. However it is best known locally as Suddage Watte which means something like "the white man's place" - nobody could understand me when I tried to say this as I was pronouncing it the way an English person would (it should be said Sud-ah-gay Wot-ay).

When I arrived Jayantha took me for a walk around some of the property. There are four colour-coded nature trails threading through the forest, with each marker-arrow being numbered so you can't get lost. Handy for night-time. However he no longer allows people in the forest at night unguided, after having caught a couple of foreigners catching tarantulas to smuggle out of the country. No prizes for guessing they were Germans. Luckily I had enough conservationist street-cred for him to say he trusted me to go out alone, but only after the night tour so he could see whether I knew what I was doing (so I'd pay the 1500 for the tour but afterwards I could spend as long as I wanted wandering around in the dark by myself).

There are lots of interesting native plants on the property, and even better Jayantha showed me where a group of lesser false vampire bats were roosting in a chimney-shaped building. Later in the night he showed me another small building, originally built as an armoury but now left as a "battery", where there was a roost of horseshoe bats. There was also a "crocodile gecko" living there, so-called for the spikes all along its back, but the lens I had on the camera couldn't focus close enough on it for a photo (from googling it appears the crocodile gecko is Hemidactylus leschenaultii). Junglefowl are easy to see here because they are fed on scraps, and giant squirrels seem common as well (I saw four just that afternoon - still haven't managed to get any photos though). I took a walk around the yellow trail for a couple of hours to pass the time. Not too many birds were around, all ones I'd seen at the previous sites, and I saw a couple of chital. When I got back a mention of fungus growing on termite mounds prompted me to say I had passed an entire mound completely covered in tiny white toadstools, like snow on a mountain. Jayantha is a fungus enthusiast and has been cataloguing the species here since he became manager in 1994. He wanted to get some photos of the termite mound, so off we went. On the way we came across some bright-orange dinner-plate-sized toadstools. In 23 years Jayantha had never seen this species at the Arboretum so he got as excited as I would over a giant rat.

I had been crossing my fingers for good weather that night. The heavy rain I'd encountered on previous evenings hadn't given me hope, but I was prepared to stay for one or two more nights if I had to. The lure of loris is strong. Sure enough, at 5pm the clouds burst open and several Amazons-worth of water came pouring out of the sky. The dirt paths immediately turned into brown rivers. I sat around for a bit watching the curtains of rain, then got an umbrella and trudged off to get some dinner at the little restaurant on the road (about 100 metres from the Arboretum gate). I don't mind rain so much, but you can't spotlight in it. Spotlighting works by reflecting the eye-shine of the animals back from your torch-beam, then you try to see them in your binoculars. When it's raining every raindrop reflects light back. Even after it stops raining it is difficult because every leaf is wet and reflective. After eating I came back and sat around some more, had some coffee, waited some more. At 7pm the rain was gone. The sky was still black but there was no rain. Off we went into the forest.

Apart for slender loris, the other mammal I particularly wanted to see was the Sri Lankan mouse deer which was supposed to be very common here. Like certain other endemic animals in Sri Lanka there are dry-zone and wet-zone forms of the mouse deer. Recently the two forms have been split into two full species, Moschiola meminna in the dry-zone (such as here at Popham's) and M. kathygre in the wet-zone. Whether this is actually justified or is just being splitty is another matter.

We hadn't been walking long, maybe five minutes, before the guide motioned at us (Jayantha and I) to come forward quickly. Mouse deer! I just saw its eyes and nothing else as it slunk into cover. I tracked along a bit with my torch where I thought it was heading, and sure enough got the eye-shine back. I quickly got my binoculars on it, and found that it wasn't a mouse deer at all, but a small Indian civet (that is, "Small Indian Civet" is the name of the species). It stood there a minute looking at me, then turned and sauntered off into the undergrowth.

I don't think it was very long before we saw our next animal. Maybe it was ten or twenty minutes. Again it was found by the guide so I'm not bothered in having to pay for the tour because the animal was a slender loris. I was actually surprised we found one. I know they are meant to be reliably seen here, but this is me and lorises we're talking about. The loris was at the top of a tree, probably twenty feet up, but I could see him perfectly well through the binoculars. He sat there amongst the branches staring down at us for a while, then clambered away into the leaves where we couldn't see him any more. There was a second loris a little while later but only the guide saw it before it ran away. They aren't slow animals at all - when they want to move, they really move.

We kept walking round the trails but the only other animal we saw was a mouse deer which was not at all cooperative. I just barely managed to see its shape well enough to say that it was a mouse deer, but not well enough to be happy with having seen a mouse deer. The night tour was just over an hour long I guess, and when it ended I said I was going to go back in the forest until I had seen a mouse deer properly. Jayantha went off to have dinner. I headed back towards the start of the trail, but before I even got there I picked up some eye-shine amongst the trees near the buildings. There was a mouse deer right there! This one was far more obliging than the other one. When the light went on it, it would just sit down like a cat with its legs tucked under its body and stare at me. We played cat-and-mouse for a bit - the mouse deer sitting down for a few minutes, then sneaking to another spot, then sitting down a bit more, while I tried to creep closer. After about five minutes of this I had got quite close, easily close enough to get a really good look with the binoculars. (Fun fact: you can see better through binoculars at night than with your own eyes because they pick up more light).

And that was that. Loris and mouse deer. All done by 9pm. I went to bed early.

 

Grey slender loris (I said it in the first paragraph so didn't think to specify it later).

The red slender loris is a wet-zone species, with a subspecies also in the Horton Plains highlands. The grey slender loris is a dry-zone species. Roughly, red are in the south and grey in the north.