Saturday
Rain came chucking down. Lightning flickered and thunder grumbled. Two daddies, three mommies and four tween/teen boys faced the reality that our safari was effectively over. The approaching early dusk only deepened the gloom as we raced and skidded on the bumpy, slippery track from the far end of Block One back toward the main entrance. It took nearly an hour to reach the gate, just a few seconds before official closing time. Being late could have cost our driver a fine.
Morning on Kirinda beach near the temple had been wonderfully sunny and breezy, as the boys enjoyed their rough-and-tumble in the tidal pools, replenished every now and then by huge waves crashing over boulders between them and the surging surf. The lovely little villa we’re staying in is called ‘Boulders.’ After a leisurely lunch and a late jump-off, the good part of our safari lasted a hundred minutes. It wasn’t raining when we started but the landscape was saturated, the northeast monsoon drenching every pocket. Water flowed across the track here and there. Gorgeous views greeted each turn: flourishing green vegetation giving way to vistas of blue lagoon stretching out to the sea half a mile away.
Just before reaching the park office to pay our fees, we spotted a mugger crocodile near the road at a shallow pond edge, mouth agape. It looked to be about 10 feet long. Most scientists hold that this mouth-gaping operates in a strange two-way thermoregulatory system. A croc needs to sunbathe so as to heat and energize its cold-blooded body but also needs to keep its brain from overcooking. Basking with mouth open lets heat escape from its head.
With powerful tails and webbed feet, muggers swim beautifully, especially favoring shallow, slow-moving fresh-water ponds, lagoons, streams and marshes. It walks on water-body bottoms and drags itself over land with belly touching the ground. Sharp eyesight and hearing help it hunt fish, snakes, turtles, rodents, otters, dogs, monkeys, deer and livestock. One was observed not long ago at Yala consuming a large pangolin over the course of several hours. They kill a large prey animal by holding it under water till it drowns. Acute smell leads it to find carrion for scavenging. It will sometimes balance sticks and branches on its head to lure birds seeking nest material.
The two biggest muggers ever measured (18 feet plus) lived in Sri Lanka. Males can weigh as much as 450 kilograms. Their density is higher in Sri Lanka than almost anywhere else, numbering roughly 3000. Worldwide, however, muggers unfortunately rate as ‘vulnerable’ on the threatened species Red List posted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Human habitat encroachment is their major nemesis.
Muggers can of course be extremely dangerous. Though a saltwater croc cannot be ruled out, it was probably a mugger that seized and drowned a British journalist on vacation with his buddies back in 2017. (Muggers inhabit the area more so than salties.) The body was found stuck in mud at the bottom of the lagoon near Arugam Bay where the young man cried out helplessly before disappearing. Crocs stash a kill when they’ve eaten recently and want to stock the larder or else want to let it ripen a bit so that it can be ripped apart more easily.
Muggers fall within a strict kill ban under the Fauna and Flora Protection Ordinance but villagers rarely inform on their neighbors. In the 2008-13 period, humans officially killed some 170 muggers (the real number may be higher) while muggers killed 12 humans. Expert Anslem de Silva investigates mugger attacks around the island. He also investigates human killings of muggers for revenge, protection and meat. He believes such crococides pose a rising threat to mugger numbers. Supported by a small grant, he installs fences in rural bathing areas to keep crocs out, thereby protecting both people and muggers as he hopes.
Monsoon is good for animals of course. Herbivores thrive on abundant vegetation, stoking excellent hunting for carnivores. But monsoon is not the greatest time for wildlife viewers. In dry months, animals cluster round the shrinking water holes, making them easy to spot. In rainy times, they disperse at will over the water-logged landscape. Nevertheless, we encounter plenty of small fry—a mongoose on a woodpile, a hoopoe bird on the jeep track, a sandpiper in a puddle near a star turtle, black-face langurs on a tree, black-neck hares huddling anxiously, strutting peacocks of course—and then some spotted deer crossing the track and a cluster of twenty sambar, some with big antlers, out on a stream ropey with sandbars. (Sambar on sandbar, hmm.)
Picture by Nate Hager
We are way down near the far end of Block One when things get more exotic. First come the jackals: one, two, three, four, trotting a few meters from our jeep in the opposite direction, spaced out in single file so as to appear one at a time, almost certainly on a hunt, like lions we’ve seen in Kenya.
The Sri Lankan Jackal is one of several sub-species of Golden Jackal, found over much of Asia and parts of eastern Europe. When hunting in pack, they engage in lengthy jogs parallel to the path of their quarry, which they will harry to exhaustion before their coordinated strike. Brits in India used to ride their horses and loose their dogs in jackal hunts when foxes weren’t available. They admired jackal stamina, with hunts lasting up to four hours. In their own hunting, jackal packs often consist of two life-bonded parents with their elder offspring. That may be precisely what we saw. In their tight-knit families, elder siblings also help mind the young.
Our driver/guide labels them ‘fox,’ since the Sinhala word (nariya) can apply to both fox and jackal. Meanwhile ‘jackal’ is a kind of loose catch-all term, more descriptive of a lifestyle than of phylogenetics. Though similar in appearance, Goldens are only distantly related to two African species also called ‘jackals.’ Goldens sit far closer to dogs and wolves, from whom they diverged roughly a million years ago. They can cross-breed with both. In Russia, jackal-dog hybrids sniff out contraband at airports.
Found in varying habitats throughout the island, our Goldens function as apex predators, at least wherever leopards do not prowl. They cull pests and vermin. Supremely adaptive omnivores, they feast on insects, birds, eggs, rodents, rabbits, small deer, even buffalo calves. They enjoy fruit, especially the berry known as ‘palu,’ beloved also by sloth bear. They scavenge on carrion and enter human settlements at night to snack on garbage. One was photographed recently at Talangama wetland in Pelawatte. They love water but can thrive in dry conditions.
In folklore, Goldens often appear as cunning tricksters. In a Jataka tale, his dearly-loved wife asks Jackal to bring some of her favorite fish. He observes two otters quarreling over how to divide one they have just caught. Offering to arbitrate, he awards the head to one, tail to the other, keeping the tasty middle as his fee. Watching as a tree sprite, Bodhisatva tsks-tsks the otters for quarrelling so counter-productively. In the Mahabharata a Golden sets his friends—tiger, wolf, mongoose and mouse—against each other so he can eat gazelle without sharing. In Hinduism’s Panchatantra, two jackals persuade Lion to befriend run-away Bull, whom Lion initially fears. Lion and Bull get so caught up talking that Lion neglects hunts that help feed the jackals. They convince Lion to kill Bull on suspicion that Bull is plotting some betrayal. Jackals get plenty of meat and a grateful Lion who promotes them to his inner circle.
Elsewhere, Kali sits in cremation grounds surrounded by millions of jackals and sometimes roams as a jackal herself. In The Jungle Book, Kipling’s Seeonee wolf pack despises the jackal Tabaqui for his phony cordiality, his scavenging ways and his servility toward their tiger foe, Shere Khan. (By the way is ‘Tabaqui’ a joke on jackal coloration, akin to the furry brownish ‘Chewbacca’ in Star Wars?) Kipling mimics real life. Indian Goldens sometimes follow tigers unmolested to scavenge remains of their kills. With their excellent hearing, they help tigers locate prey and may sometimes assist in cornering it.
Some Sri Lankans prize rare (and perhaps apocryphal) half-inch horny skull growths called ‘jackal’s horn’ (narric-comboo). It grants boons and wishes and helps win lawsuits. Jackals find themselves poached for horns which some experts claim do not actually exist, contending that those sold in markets are clever fakes. Any such poaching is sad, though Goldens face no close extinction threat. Lanka’s under-appreciated jackal deserves better.
Picture by Nate Hager
A few minutes later, we meet what to me is the day’s highlight: the rare Black-Necked Stork. It’s a juvenile with bright yellow female eyes. Not a bit shy, she walks over right next to our jeep, poking around in a puddle. She’s stunning. Up close, her ‘black’ head and long neck turns into shimmering streaks of iridescent indigo. Bird eyes have a fourth color cone in addition to the three we use to detect red, green and blue. That fourth cone extends their color vision beyond blue into an ultra-violet range we cannot see. Our three cones working together let us distinguish around a million different colors, but birds can distinguish around a hundred million. Shall we try to imagine how our girl’s head and neck might look to another black-necked stork?
Tallest bird on the island, these storks reach heights approaching six feet and wing spans exceeding seven. They supposedly reside only in and around Yala, stalking both fresh open water and shallow marshes. Their long heavy beaks stab and snatch fish, frogs, water birds, eggs, hatchling turtles, crabs and mollusks. Parents take turns guarding nestlings and hunting. When the hunter returns to nest, they greet with open wings and bobbing heads. At other times, they may greet with fluttering wings and bills clattering against each other. With perhaps only 50 total birds on the island and a Yala nesting population of less than 10 pairs, they rate as ‘critically endangered’ on Sri Lanka’s Red List. Heavy monsoon years favor survival of chicks, light monsoons not so much. Fortunately, with maybe 20,000 total birds from the Indian subcontinent through southeast Asia, New Guinea and northern Australia, the worldwide species rates as only ‘near threatened’ (possibly vulnerable in near future).
Just before the downpour, we’re in for one last treat: a pair of Brown Fish-Owls perched on a branch above to our left and slightly behind us. (How good are these park guides at spotting wildlife?) Two feet tall with huge yellow-iris eyes, they reside in large trees near water bodies where they pick up fish with their sharp-edged talons at night. The force of their swoop and talon clutch kills instantaneously. Unlike some owls whose acute hearing helps them pinpoint their strikes, fish-owls rely on those huge eyes for their watery hunts. Fish don’t make enough noise. With eyes close together and fixed forward, unlike other birds, owls exploit excellent binocular eyesight for perceiving depth and distance. Their pupils expand to take up almost their whole eyes, allowing them to soak up any traces of light. Their vision is especially pitched to detect movement.
Like all owls, Brownies regurgitate indigestible prey matter as pellets through their mouths. While roosting, they sing penetrating deep bass duets—oomp, oooomp, oomp—with one bird on the first and third syllables, the other on the slightly higher-pitched middle.
Widely regarded as ‘wise,’ owls may indeed be quite smart. Like parrots, crows and magpies, they carry large brains for their body size. Young owls profit from extensive and prolonged parental care and teaching. Such ‘social learning,’ along with their proclivity toward playfulness, seem to go with high problem-solving ability in novel situations.
Fish-owls appear with special frequency in and around Wilpattu with its abundant water holes. A Northwest Province tale features seven fish-owls who befriend one another and go looking for a woman they can all marry. Exaggerating their prosperity, they successfully petition a human king for one of his daughters. Failing to get her pregnant in the normal way, they force-feed her on cumin seeds to help do the trick. She swells up, bursts and dies. Readers will surely grasp the moral of the tale: warning against marrying above one’s station.
Sunday
After an early-morning cloudburst, our jeep finally showed up. We issued our driver/guide one emphatic instruction: find us a leopard!! No stopping for elephants, no crocs, no buffalo, no bee-eaters. We offered an award in advance. We raced around the tracks at breakneck speed, bouncing like popcorn. Our driver began mentioning a mother and cub somewhere in the vicinity as he monitored the phone calls incoming from other jeeps.
There ahead, a cluster of jeeps. We pull up, whipping out binoculars, cameras and phones. She’s lounging in the crook of a tree, a hundred meters off. Guides tell us they have just been eating. Everyone gets a great sighting, except for me. I’m badly positioned in the jeep with bodies in my way, looking for a while at the wrong tree, and my binoculars refuse to focus properly. I do catch a glimpse with my naked eye as she shifts position to face our way. I’m happy for my companions: leopards normally vanish the moment I climb into a jeep. Everyone snaps merrily away with cameras.
There’s no end to interesting things one could learn and say about Lanka’s leopard. To me, the most striking item is that she’s one of three big cats who have lived here. A fairly robust fossil trove proves the presence of tiger as recently as 14,000 years ago, well after modern humans arrived some 40,000 years ago. Their presence indicates a wet jungle habitat over at least part of Sri Lanka. Their bones show up in human settlement remains, indicating they may have been on the menu. A more fragmentary fossil trove testifies that lion roamed here some 100,000 years ago, in company with some big-brained pre-modern upright hominins. They may have been here more recently as well, but we lack evidence. Their presence indicates a grassland savanna habitat. If that disappeared for an extended period, lions would have had trouble surviving. But savanna probably did persist in a long, cool arid period before warming began maybe 15,000 years ago.
Leopards arrived here at least 100,000 years ago. It therefore seems plausible that three big cats lived here simultaneously once upon a time. This is especially likely during a period when Lanka connected with India via land bridge during ice ages causing low sea levels. This was mainly the case from 150,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago when warming took over and seas rose to drown Adam’s Bridge. Migration back and forth between here and India would have been normal during that previous cold-climate period.
Big cat co-habitation became infeasible, however, as the land bridge disappeared. That locked apex predators into zero-sum competition for territory and sustenance on an island with no possible population imports. Only one apex cat could avoid falling extinct. Today, leopards worldwide command the widest range of any big cat. Because they don’t hesitate to kill any prey they can get their paws on, they thrive in widely various landscapes and climates. In Sri Lanka, they prowl in every major park and nature reserve, from sandy sea-level scrub to mountain cloud forest. In short, the leopard’s plucky success on the island owes to its smaller size and territorial needs, its survivability on small and varying prey, and its general adaptability. And that, Mr. Kipling, is how Lanka’s leopard got its ‘spots.’
Writer, lawyer and former law professor, Mark Hager lives with his family in Pelawatte.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahager/
Further Reading:
Markle, Jackals: Nature’s Clean-Up Crew
Maheswaran, Ecology and Behavior of Black-Necked Stork
Stevenson, Crocodiles of the World
Kellett, Leopards: The Ultimate Leopard Book for Kids
Raggett, Remembering Leopards
Ackerman, What an Owl Knows
Duncan, Owls of the World
Organizations and Resources:
Crocodile Specialist Group (worldwide)
Sri Lankan Jackal Project
Field Ornithology Group of Sri Lanka
Wildlife and Nature Protection Society (Sri Lanka)
Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society (Sri Lanka)
Department of Wildlife Conservation (Sri Lanka)
International Owl Center (U.S.)
Owl Research Institute (U.S.)
Global Owl Project (U.S.)
Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund (U.A.E.)