Saturday 18th March

Red kite in treetop

Back over two weeks since Sri Lanka now and, in terms of nature, it's been a fairly typical welcome home - some pretty iffy if slightly warmer weather and a large number of red kites on my first trip out in the Loch Ken area. I think I must have seen twenty in the space of about half an hour.  One of them even settled in a tree. Though I did not manage to get a very good photo, I haven't seen one do that before.

Before I went on holiday I put up a nesting box in the little silver birch in my front garden.  One or two tits have given it the once over but there is no sign of anything building a nest. Maybe it still smells a bit new.

Obviously I have done my best to detail the highlights of the Sri Lanka trip in the preceding posts, but there are still one or two issues of a more general nature to discuss.

One of these is climate change.  Obviously Sri Lanka does have quite a high rainfall but the time of our visit at the end of February should have been a dry period and is generally acknowledged as the height of the tourism season in the South East of the country. Our guides were concerned about the fact that there had been a long period of drought delaying what would normally have been the monsoon season, which arrived late and explained the continuance of heavy downpours into the holiday season. We didn't gain any information about the effects on wlidlife to date but there are grounds for apprehension.

It is obvious that the Sri Lankan government has introduced a lot of environmental protection measures.  Catching butterflies and using moth traps are for example illegal and there has been a clear policy of establishing Nature Reserves and regulating their use.  So it is now illegal to bring food into the Sinharaja Forest Park because of some of the undesirable substances found in bird droppings, and we weren't allowed to get out of the jeep in the Wasmaguwa reserve.  It might be added that the government has also maximised the profits from the tourist trade at such locations, as the charges for entry are very much higher for tourists than for local people.

In particular, we were impressed that measures have been taken to end the cruel practice of taming wild elephants as it is quite apparent that this can only be achieved by totally breaking the spirit of the animals.  It was explained to us that the herding and sexual instincts of elephants are extremely strong and can only be kerbed by a systematic programme of cruelty over a period of several months.

There were some domesticated elephants working near the hotel at Sirijiya, but I declined to take pictures of them.