Sinharaja with Shiromi Lazarus

Shiromi is a family friend studying fashion design & she travelled with me to Sinharaja from 20-22 Aug, 2007 during her vacation. On the way, we paused in the Morapitiya Rain forest, to catch the early morning activity. Morapitiya is a good quality rain forest on the way to Sinharaja. The prime birding area in it is usually accessed by means of a 4 WD jeep, but since this was sort of an unscheduled stop, I used a local tuk-tuk that was in the junction for the first time, which was great fun!

The tuk-tuks no matter how courageous the driver would be, just cannot ply the last 2 km rocky & uphill stretch. Although at Rs. 500 up and down (you need to tell in advance the time to report to be picked up for the journey back), it does seem a bargain compared to Rs. 5,000-7,000 that you have to pay for jeeps that have to come from all the way from Ratnapura and Sinharaja areas for this purpose, I must confess that walking the last stretch up & down weighed down by all the optical equipment was quite tiring especially due to the lack of overhead tree cover along this stretch and the high humidity; which often hovers in the high 90s. As most birders do not enjoy such high-adrenalin adventure while birding (not that we are lazy), I would like to rule out this option especially for those empty-nesters. And thanks Shiromi, for being my guinea pig!

For all the physical hardships she had to endure following a mad leader, I was able to properly reward Shiromi with cracking scope views of a rare endemic butterfly; the Blue Oakleaf, which was spotted by me while trying its best to appear like a decayed leaf in a dimly-lit area of the forest. What a fabulous example of protective resemblance! Noteworthy birds included Orange-billed Babbler, Crested Goshawk & Lesser Hill Myna.

We reached Sinharaja by lunch time and explored the forest post lunch. Since this was the school holidays there were several bus loads of local visitors numbering to over 500! Despite this, we had superb birding with several mixed species bird flocks and Shiromi had multiple scope views of pretty much all the flock-associated birds such as the Red-faced Malkoha, Malabar Trogon & Sri Lanka Scimitar Babbler to name a few.

While returning to Martin’s after our birding walk, I noticed a stray dog carrying something big in the mouth. I got by binoculars on it immediately to see a half a Mouse Dear; aka Indian Chevrotain. The dog which carried it delivered it to a puppy that was around by which time ½ the carcass from belly down was missing! The ungrateful puppy started growling at the donor and started to bite it away like KFC – terrible!

Groves and Meijaard who analyzed the skins and skulls of Chevrotains from Sri Lanka and India (2005) found considerable differences and based on them they split the species into 3, raising this particular wet zone population and Sri Lanka’s dry zone population into two endemic species, with the Indian species being the third. Accordingly this one is now Moschiola kathygre. Also according to this study a further new species is due to be announced from Nuwara Eliya, which gives Sri Lanka 3 species of endemic Chevrotains!

Click here to read the full paper.

Although there aren’t too many strays are around the regular trails that we go walking, I strongly advise visitors exploring Sinharaja and jungle trails to refrain from entertaining dogs that you come across in the village area as they are quite likely to follow you all the way into the forest and hunt wildife. I presume the dogs may have come with the big crowds that visited the forest today. Another causalty of mass-tourism!

In the brief pre-breakfast walk on the 21st, Shiromi was fortunate of see the formation of a mixed-species bird flock close to the man entrance. As I am particularly fond of studying the feeding ecology of the birds in the mixed-species bird flocks (by the way, click here to read one of my short papers on this subject of the regular flock participant; Red-faced Malkoha), one of the top personal highlights for me this morning was being observe the usually insectivorous Orange-billed Babbler and Ashy-headed Laughingthrush feeding on the fruits of the pioneer, ‘Bu Kenda” (Macaranga indica). This shows that insectivores birds would opportunistically feed on fruits when available. Back at Martin’s we enjoyed a birding breakfast and soon it started to rain. And rain. And rain. It lasted steadily for a good 2 ½ hours, giving us ample time to play two absorbing games of scrabble while sipping tea and enjoy the great views of the rain forest in rain. Did I win? I am afraid so, and Shiromi became yet another one of my victims, all due to the unpredictability of the rain forest weather!

Walking back to our vehicle on the 22nd having said goodbye to Martin, we encountered a pair of Sri Lanka Myna inspecting a nest hole in a dead Fish-tail Palm (Cayota urens). It afforded us excellent views and I was able to quickly fire some digi-scoping shots. We also encountered a secondary forest-associated mixed-species bird flock with a slightly different combination of species comprising of White-browed Bulbul, Black-capped Bulbul, Red-vented Bulbul, Yellow-billed Babbler, Common Iora, Yellow-fronted Barbet, Brown-headed Barbet, White-bellied Drongo, Sri Lanka Hanging Parrot & Black-rumped Flameback. A potential split (for non-bird watchers; likely to be elevated to a full species), Hill Munia was also see in the scope along the way.

Before heading back, I got the news today from Jaya, a birding colleague that he had heard the news that a pair of Slaty-legged Crake had raised 2 young in Martin’ younger son; Patta’s home garden who had claimed to have seen the chicks being raised from fluffy black ball-like stage onwards, accompanied by the two parent birds. As this species is listed in the Sri Lankan bird list as regular migrant, this would be the first record of it breeding in Sri Lanka. As this place is on the way down, I tried to visit it but unfortunately I couldn’t locate the turn off! I later regretted this!

Anyway a consolation came in the form of an endemic Sri Lanka Blossom Krait (Balanophis ceylonensis) , which was spotted on the trail while devouring a toad. The genus 'balanophis' is special that it is a monotyptic one meaning there is only 1 species under it, which is in this case endemic to Sri Lanka.