Birdwatching in Sri Lanka

Standing in sweaty silence for an hour on a precipitous sliver of muddy footpath above a waterfall may not be everybody’s idea of fun, but for a small cluster of birders anxious to see the Sri Lanka whistling thrush it was a small price to pay. Eventually, as the cicadas shrilled and the dark closed in, the little blue-black bird appeared — and flitted away almost as quickly. Another evening, we scrambled 100 heart-pumping yards up a rainforest jungle slope for a view of the Serendib Scops owl, a reddish bird so rare it has been known to science only since 2004 and is one of 34 species endemic to the Beautiful Island.

Birders do it before dawn and after dark as well as happily — well, more or less happily — trekking ten kilometres or so a day, swinging across narrow suspension bridges, fording streams and slushing through bogs or bouncing up and down bone-shuddering ravines in Jeeps. It is the birds you had to work for that you remember most vividly, but fortunately most of the 462 species to be seen in Sri Lanka are both more colourful and easier to spot. We had scarcely left the airport before a greater coucal and a Shikra hawk showed themselves in full daylight.

Among the endemic species we spotted were the engaging little hanging parrot, the improbable grey hornbill, the strutting jungle-fowl and other colourful customers like the red-faced malkoha, the scimitar babbler, Legge’s flowerpecker and a woodpecker called the crimson-backed flameback.

With around 10,000 species to be seen across the world, birders accumulate more air miles than most. Some are fanatical ‘listers’, ready to quit a trip the moment the merest glimpse of a tailfeather has enabled them to tick off a missing species.