I don’t know who the woman was, but I remember her words exactly. She’d signed up for a bird walk as part of the Galle Literary Festival, a celebration held every year in the fort town on Sri Lanka’s south coast. For most of our walk she’d seemed vaguely baffled. But then she’d looked through borrowed binoculars at the paddy-field marshes across the road. There, softened by mist and distance, was an extraordinary number of birds: pond herons, black-tailed godwits, greenshanks, wood sandpipers, pheasant-tailed jacanas resembling animate china ornaments and little green bee-eaters that glowed like neon bulbs. Flocks of whiskered terns rose and fell like slow breaths in the dusk air.
When the woman lowered the binoculars her face was bright with revelation. “Oh,” she breathed, “I get it now.”
I grinned, because yes. Five years ago my life-long love of birding was wrecked by a tour that raced around a neotropical country searching for as many species as possible to tick off our lists. There was no time for anything else. By the end of the first week I was in a sulk, by the end of the second, depression, and I got home just in time for the pandemic. The experience was so grim that when the celebrated Sri Lankan naturalist Gehan De Silva suggested I join him and his wife Nirma for a few days of birding after my appearance at the literary festival, I was so hesitant I didn’t reply to his email for weeks.
But I knew Sri Lanka was a naturalist’s paradise. For its size the nation is startlingly diverse in habitats, from tropical forests to dry woodlands, wetlands, open grasslands and high altitude cloud forests, and it has a corresponding wealth of biodiversity: 34 of its bird species are found nowhere else in the world. I said yes to Gehan, who agreed that my old friend Christina, also attending the festival in Galle, should join us.
I met Gehan just before we led our bird walk for festival goers around the grounds of the Malabar Hill hotel, just north of Weligama and about 45 minutes’ drive east of Galle. It is the kind of hotel that once seen, populates one’s dreams. Shaded corners, perfect miniature lotus blooms and a veranda restaurant opening on to miles of forest under a sky already turned the particular azure of early evening.
Gehan turned out to be a precise, gentle man clad in a naturalist’s khaki green shirt and trousers. “I never wear anything else,” he explained, with gleeful self-deprecation. He spoke passionately about Sri Lanka’s avifauna as we wandered with 50 people around the Malabar’s rewilded cinnamon estate, pointing out wildlife as we went. A sleeping tree squirrel. A purple-faced monkey lounging on a bare tree, a pair of green pigeons, a black-headed oriole gilded by the setting sun.
There are many ways to learn more about an unfamiliar place. You can take excursions to historical sites, visit temples; experience a cuisine, a musical tradition; find fascination in a region’s geology. All are valid. For me, the way into a place has always been birds. Finding them is a simple joy — humans like to look for things they’ve never seen before — but there’s much more. Birds stitch time and place together.
The first one I saw in Sri Lanka was a Brahminy kite over the airport road. Now, recalling the tilt of its wings evokes the taste of the air pouring through the car window, the sun on passing trucks, the silhouette of Colombo’s Lotus Tower, tuk-tuk engines, the scent of the floral garland I was handed at my hotel. If you’ve never watched birds before, I commend it to you as a way of encountering new places. Grab a local field guide (Gehan has written a great wildlife guide to Sri Lanka), a pair of binoculars, and open your eyes. Birds can and will surprise you.
From Malabar Hill, we set off the next morning on a birding tour arranged by Jetwing Eco Holidays, stopping for coffee en route to the south-west coast at Jetwing’s Kaduruketha hotel in Wellawaya. There I had my first taste of kalu dodol (a type of fudge ascended to a higher plane) and watched peacocks stalking the grounds in some awe. Sri Lankan peacocks are wild, snake-necked, bare-thighed, muscular, reptilian, lizard-eating creatures, and have special importance as the vehicle, or mount, of the god Kataragama. They’ve expanded their range in Sri Lanka in recent years, and the major roads we drove were plastered with yellow warning signs that read “DANGER PEACOCKS”. This amused me until I remembered that peacocks can weigh more than 5kg — and fly.
Picking our way through the streets of Pottuvil between streams of schoolchildren on bicycles, we arrived at Jetwing Surf & Safari on Sri Lanka’s east coast, a collection of thatched luxury cabanas set among tall palms and lawns by a wide sand beach beloved of nesting turtles. Sunbirds the colour of petrol on water flitted about the flowerbeds by the ocean as we ate a lunch of curry and rice (anyone who has spent time in Sri Lanka knows this description is a masterly understatement, considering the complexity and number of its constituent dishes).
In the early evening we drove a short way up the road to take a lagoon tour operated by members of the local community co-operative. Our guides paddled us across the water atop a cushioned platform fixed to two long, sturdy canoes. Meditatively, peacefully, we travelled down backwaters into caves of mangrove roots and thick riparian forest thronged with birds ready to roost.
Then a whisper and pointed hands from our guides. Under the tea-tinted shallows near the shore, a thick curve of patterned geometry sent wide ripples towards us. Was it an eel? A huge fish? I saw the two ridges of scales along its flattened top, and knew. Slowly, the saltwater crocodile shifted its vast bulk out on to land, nosing its way through snapping vegetation into the darkness beyond, and I mused on the fact that wonder can, in some circumstances, entirely obliterate fear.
I discovered that night that thunderstorms can be deeply calming if you’re sleeping in a luxury cabana. It was still raining in the morning — we were at the very tail-end of the monsoon — and the air was a heady, electric mix of tropical surf and wet foliage. After breakfast we clambered into a guided safari jeep and started our journey to Kumana National Park, a less well-known section of Sri Lanka’s extensive national park system. We passed miles of paddy fields, vast, rounded granitic gneiss landforms — one bearing the tiny white dome of remote Kudumbigala Monastery — slowing down for the last section as we wove our way through rain-filled potholes and rivulets of running water on red earth to reach the park gates.
I wasn’t bored for a second. I’m so used to impoverished ecosystems in Britain that I barely glance out of the window on trains, but the whole drive was full of natural-historical incident: Malabar pied hornbills yelled at each other from a dead casuarina tree, painted storks waded in lakes, a crested hawk-eagle with day-glo eyes ate a frog right by us on a grassy verge. We spent a long time parked up to watch a juvenile changeable hawk-eagle with the air of a very predatory stuffed toy preening his damp feathers from a branch close to the car.
Inside the park it got better and better. Spotted deer ankled their way through the grass, wild boar ran across the road, butterflies glinted in the soft air after the rain stopped. I remember an elephant hauling out the roots of aquatic plants from a stretch of shallow water, slapping them against the surface to rid them of mud and stones, then stuffing them into his mouth. I remember a wallow full of water buffalo and the nose of a soft-shelled terrapin protruding from the muddy water, and we spent a full 10 minutes watching a land monitor (a lizard of extremely impressive size) slowly and luxuriantly digging holes in the sand and nosing his way into them to find beetle grubs.
There was joy in the deliberation, slowness and success of this creature, and I knew that this was the kind of wildlife watching I’d needed. The kind that lets you spend time with creatures being themselves, rather than ticking them off lists. But sometimes we were granted only fleeting views, and they were perfect too. A mouse deer was one half-second of turning flanks, frail legs, spots of white running down its sides like lost patches of sun.
Kumana had been so all-consuming that I was exhausted during the drive the next morning. Then we stopped off at Ravana Ella Falls in the Central Highlands. It was Navam Poya — a significant public holiday — and the place was packed. Families lined up in the ravine to pose for photos. Gazing up at the rocks of the 90ft waterfall I felt so reinvigorated I wondered if I could climb up there. Turning to see a sign reading “Don’t Climb The Rock. Death Total 36” persuaded me I should not. Gehan showed us an endemic, anthracite-coloured damselfly basking like a shadow of itself on a rock next to a floating Sprite bottle. Macaques loitered near stalls selling roasted corn and peanuts; there were screams of laughter from children cooling down under a water pipe, and butterflies everywhere.
Onwards, and mountains rose and shifted around us. For a while the road was laid with tarpaulins spread with drying maize and rice. The air cooled, and the vegetation on the hills around us became an orderly, strangely silvered green. We’d reached the tea estates.
Our stop that night was the Hoffmann Bungalow, built as a 1940s holiday home amid a hundred acres of tea bushes on the Uva Ben Head Estate in Welimada. Of all the places I stayed on this trip, I loved it the most. Partly for its quiet luxury and peaceful isolation; partly for the phenomenal organic meals prepared by chef Chandrakumar. Partly, of course, for its birdlife — miniature hanging parrots zipping overhead, flame-backed woodpeckers laddering themselves around the tall trunks of Grevilleas and silky oaks, sombre tits that looked exactly like great tits filmed in black-and-white.
But this villa affected me mostly because it made me feel about seven years old. I grew up in Camberley on an estate owned by the Theosophical Society that was filled with bungalows just like this, right down to their glossy parquet floors, picture windows and carefully tended rock gardens. Realising that I grew up in a place designed to remind its elderly residents of their colonial childhoods on Indian and Sri Lankan tea estates was a reminder of how intrinsically colonialism has shaped all our lives, even if we choose not to see it.
An evening walk around the estate was made magical by the sunset and Gayan the property manager’s punchy, beguiling history of the tea trade; he pinched pairs and tips of leaves from the bushes to show us how to harvest various grades of tea — everything here is handpicked. Later, at the villa, we were treated to an extensive tea-tasting session, picking up the curled dried leaves, sniffing them, tasting the brews they made to ascertain the differences that harvests and processes produce. Despite frogs and crickets calling loudly in the dark, I fell asleep that night feeling unnervingly at home.
Sutras broadcast from a nearby temple woke me; we were to head higher that day, to Horton Plains National Park. It’s famed for its spectacular views from the cliff aptly named World’s End, and for its leopards which prey on its many thousands of sambar deer. We rose on switchbacks through forests that were first tall eucalyptus then dense-leaved pine — until we broke out into what seemed a different country, one with the dreamlike quality of all high places. Here the air felt thin and the trees were jewelled with ruby leaves, epiphytic ferns and orchids. Red-flowered rhododendrons sprawled everywhere; there were tiny ferns on the roadside and flowers like sprays of frail stars.
Finally we reached the plateau, where enormous tracts of moorland grass shivered in the wind, and crested honey buzzards soared under the white clouds. There was no miraculous leopard sighting for us, but we met their prey: a sambar stag at our stop for a packed lunch in the grounds of Farr Inn, a former colonial hunting lodge turned visitor centre. He looked like a small, very serious red deer stag, though darker, shaggier and sporting an impressive neck beard, and he was entirely unbothered by our company. Black chats sang from the pine trees and mountain crows sidled up hoping for snacks. And it should not go without mention that Horton also has what must be the world’s most picturesque public toilets. I was so taken with the view I dropped my phone out of the window and had to climb quite a long way down a hill to retrieve it.
Driving back to Colombo in the morning, admiring our driver Janaka’s frighteningly cool facility for passing logging trucks on narrow mountain roads, I felt properly blessed. The trip had reignited my love for birds and spurred in me a determination to return to Sri Lanka as soon as I could, but had also restored, in a way, my faith in the world, at a time when things elsewhere are terrifyingly grim.
Every wildlife trip has a single golden moment that settles somewhere in one’s soul and lives there. I suppose it ought to have been the spectacularly lucky sight of a white-bellied sea eagle pulling an unwary black-winged stilt from a lake and carrying it off in a jumble of feathers and trailing legs. Or the perfect golden jackals that stopped in the road and gazed right at us as we gazed at them.
No. It was a little crowd of swallows sitting together on the dusty road. To begin with I didn’t know they were birds at all: just a peculiar pile of angles lit blue by the sun and black by deep shadow. Then I saw heads, rising wings. They’d just bathed, were still very wet, and as we approached, sprang up one by one to land on a wire fence nearby, twittering musically. Their transformation from a confused, metallic heap that glittered like beetle casings into the ease of familiar birds enjoying the warm sun and company: that was my golden moment of this birding tour, and one that’s come to stand for the whole.
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