Farnboro John
Well-known member
I was hoping to have a bash at the Brown Bats as we crossed on the ferry but there was real mist over the river this evening (thankfully it didn’t extend into the forest, though every tree and leaf was dripping) and the bats weaved in and out of the tendrils of mist which picked up the torchlight and left my camera unable to lock onto them by the time we reached the forest side of the voyage to once again jump ashore and up the steps away from the landing place.
Up past the village we went, our first stop being by the huge flower at the base of a banana bunch. Fulvous Fruit Bats were flying up, nectaring and dropping away again, quick but not impossibly so. Next we found ourselves pausing by a pool in front of one building when Dulan pointed out a Sri Lanka Rock Frog. I stepped up onto a wall to get a decent angle and having taken my picture of the frog found it a little difficult to make the long step back down…. My muscles are less elastic in stretching and for jumping purposes, have no absorbent resilience at all these days!
We carried on and I have a vague feeling we’d been up one path and back down it before someone picked up a moth in their light, hanging from a branch a few yards off the path. It was an Oleander Hawk Moth and we all took turns trooping through the forest margin to photograph it and enjoy its subtle colours merging and fading one into another.
Next up was a Sri Lanka Wolf Snake by the path. It curled its head first underneath itself and then under a wide leaf. Dulan removed this, drawing his hand back briskly as the snake struck at it: no venom but reputedly a hard bite that he just avoided! Thus exposed the snake came in my direction and to a general shot of its coils I now added a couple of portrait shots. An improvement on the previous night’s encounter. This was followed by a new and different enormous spider, over eight inches across its leg span but thinner and racier than the bird-eating tarantula of the previous night.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Dulan led us back to the rice paddy we’d investigated during the afternoon, and as we made our way along its margin an Indian Crested Porcupine rushed towards us with its quills rattling as it came. It definitely knew we were there because every light was upon it but it kept coming: just as we began to wonder about getting stuck by its weaponry Dulan calmly put up a foot and brought it to a brief and not ungentle halt with a boot sole on its forehead for a brake. With little pause, it gathered itself, went by us inches away between us and the fence, then launched itself up the bank and under the strands of wire to disappear between the trees. There was a brief buzz of conversation and relieved laughter. We were then properly startled at the far corner of the field by the sound of a Wild Boar erupting from the vegetation away from us up the same bank and across the fence into the forest! Later we saw probably the same Porcupine ambling along the forest floor as we looked down a tall and very steep bank.
We carried on but found only frogs and toads including an Orange-canthal Shrub Frog, before retracing our steps and heading uphill once more into the rainforest. Time for a biggie…. The forest delivered, with a Brown Palm Civet climbing a naked sapling trunk and pausing part way up lit by our torches and in a perfect position for a photograph. It stayed long enough for us to watch it properly, enjoying its chestnut-brown fur, foxy/bear-like face with big round ears and its obvious arboreal agility. Just phenomenal. Strangely, having now seen more than one of the options we inclined more to the splitting view….
It kept getting better: Dulan found us a Red Slender Loris and though the views were difficult through a narrow gap between trees they were definite and lasted for a good bit more than a few seconds. Then he began finding Yellow-spotted Chevrotains along the line of a stream wending its way down the hill: we saw two or three in a fairly small area and short time. Mind you they didn’t really hang about, fading back away from us into the undergrowth. He suggested waiting a while but for some reason we preferred to get on. In retrospect I think that may have been a mistake. But maybe not, because all wildlife watching is about coincidences of space, time and beings meeting, and we weren’t finished yet….
Big John spotted something sitting up in a tree, not too far, maybe fifteen feet: he thought a roosting bird and he was right because it was a Sri Lanka Frogmouth. I’d never seen any frogmouth so this was a big deal for me, and it was absolutely calm as we manoeuvred around it to take our pictures. Lovely lovely lovely.
The Anthropogenic Shrub Frog that followed wasn’t quite the same quality for my money but it had a certain je ne sais quoi all the same and fitted the pan-species nature of the walk very well.
I remember Dulan suggesting at one point that anyone who wanted to could head home: Big John was definitely suffering with Mr Babbs’s cold by now and we’d had a load of target species. He said we could pay the ferryman – no more than 1500 rupees – and I commented “not till he gets you to the other side” – unable as ever to resist a cheap joke. But nobody wanted to stop, we all wanted the last bits and pieces from the trip. Not everything we saw was amenable to being photographed and that seemed to increase as the night wore on: perhaps our reactions (well mine) slowed down as tiredness set in: so we now added some species I can’t show you with pictures. A Bi-colored Rat in particular that Dulan called, ran down a tree branch right in front of me in the open but was just too fast for me – or perhaps my camera arm froze and I opted to just watch instead. Back at the edge of the village Dulan spotted an Eastern House Mouse in the rafters of an open storage shelter and it took me quite a while to get a not very good view of it. I did manage to get my bins on it in the end and it was just as exciting as you would imagine.
At last we all made our way down to the ferry and crossed the unexpectedly still high river together before heading for our respective rooms, a leech check (I had got away with it again but Roy had been had on his upper chest, goodness knows how) and finally the delight of extinction as our heads hit our respective pillows.
Fulvous Fruit Bat
Oleander Hawk Moth
Sri Lanka Wolf Snake X2
Up past the village we went, our first stop being by the huge flower at the base of a banana bunch. Fulvous Fruit Bats were flying up, nectaring and dropping away again, quick but not impossibly so. Next we found ourselves pausing by a pool in front of one building when Dulan pointed out a Sri Lanka Rock Frog. I stepped up onto a wall to get a decent angle and having taken my picture of the frog found it a little difficult to make the long step back down…. My muscles are less elastic in stretching and for jumping purposes, have no absorbent resilience at all these days!
We carried on and I have a vague feeling we’d been up one path and back down it before someone picked up a moth in their light, hanging from a branch a few yards off the path. It was an Oleander Hawk Moth and we all took turns trooping through the forest margin to photograph it and enjoy its subtle colours merging and fading one into another.
Next up was a Sri Lanka Wolf Snake by the path. It curled its head first underneath itself and then under a wide leaf. Dulan removed this, drawing his hand back briskly as the snake struck at it: no venom but reputedly a hard bite that he just avoided! Thus exposed the snake came in my direction and to a general shot of its coils I now added a couple of portrait shots. An improvement on the previous night’s encounter. This was followed by a new and different enormous spider, over eight inches across its leg span but thinner and racier than the bird-eating tarantula of the previous night.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Dulan led us back to the rice paddy we’d investigated during the afternoon, and as we made our way along its margin an Indian Crested Porcupine rushed towards us with its quills rattling as it came. It definitely knew we were there because every light was upon it but it kept coming: just as we began to wonder about getting stuck by its weaponry Dulan calmly put up a foot and brought it to a brief and not ungentle halt with a boot sole on its forehead for a brake. With little pause, it gathered itself, went by us inches away between us and the fence, then launched itself up the bank and under the strands of wire to disappear between the trees. There was a brief buzz of conversation and relieved laughter. We were then properly startled at the far corner of the field by the sound of a Wild Boar erupting from the vegetation away from us up the same bank and across the fence into the forest! Later we saw probably the same Porcupine ambling along the forest floor as we looked down a tall and very steep bank.
We carried on but found only frogs and toads including an Orange-canthal Shrub Frog, before retracing our steps and heading uphill once more into the rainforest. Time for a biggie…. The forest delivered, with a Brown Palm Civet climbing a naked sapling trunk and pausing part way up lit by our torches and in a perfect position for a photograph. It stayed long enough for us to watch it properly, enjoying its chestnut-brown fur, foxy/bear-like face with big round ears and its obvious arboreal agility. Just phenomenal. Strangely, having now seen more than one of the options we inclined more to the splitting view….
It kept getting better: Dulan found us a Red Slender Loris and though the views were difficult through a narrow gap between trees they were definite and lasted for a good bit more than a few seconds. Then he began finding Yellow-spotted Chevrotains along the line of a stream wending its way down the hill: we saw two or three in a fairly small area and short time. Mind you they didn’t really hang about, fading back away from us into the undergrowth. He suggested waiting a while but for some reason we preferred to get on. In retrospect I think that may have been a mistake. But maybe not, because all wildlife watching is about coincidences of space, time and beings meeting, and we weren’t finished yet….
Big John spotted something sitting up in a tree, not too far, maybe fifteen feet: he thought a roosting bird and he was right because it was a Sri Lanka Frogmouth. I’d never seen any frogmouth so this was a big deal for me, and it was absolutely calm as we manoeuvred around it to take our pictures. Lovely lovely lovely.
The Anthropogenic Shrub Frog that followed wasn’t quite the same quality for my money but it had a certain je ne sais quoi all the same and fitted the pan-species nature of the walk very well.
I remember Dulan suggesting at one point that anyone who wanted to could head home: Big John was definitely suffering with Mr Babbs’s cold by now and we’d had a load of target species. He said we could pay the ferryman – no more than 1500 rupees – and I commented “not till he gets you to the other side” – unable as ever to resist a cheap joke. But nobody wanted to stop, we all wanted the last bits and pieces from the trip. Not everything we saw was amenable to being photographed and that seemed to increase as the night wore on: perhaps our reactions (well mine) slowed down as tiredness set in: so we now added some species I can’t show you with pictures. A Bi-colored Rat in particular that Dulan called, ran down a tree branch right in front of me in the open but was just too fast for me – or perhaps my camera arm froze and I opted to just watch instead. Back at the edge of the village Dulan spotted an Eastern House Mouse in the rafters of an open storage shelter and it took me quite a while to get a not very good view of it. I did manage to get my bins on it in the end and it was just as exciting as you would imagine.
At last we all made our way down to the ferry and crossed the unexpectedly still high river together before heading for our respective rooms, a leech check (I had got away with it again but Roy had been had on his upper chest, goodness knows how) and finally the delight of extinction as our heads hit our respective pillows.
Fulvous Fruit Bat
Oleander Hawk Moth
Sri Lanka Wolf Snake X2
