Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

Ordinary Beautiful - In Search Of Sri Lanka’s Lost Mammals: A Ceylon Press Alternative Guide

This is not a story of Sri Lanka’s mammalian kings and queens, its terra firma princelings, or its most photographed animal celebrities. Instead, it is a tour of the island’s plebs; its ordinary beautiful mammals, the ones lost in the scramble to bag elephants and monkeys, deer, leopards, wild boar, buffalo and even bears.

These superstars more than make up for what bucket list baggers would regard as the world’s most glamorous mammals. Jaguars, panthers, gorillas chimps, giraffes, zebra, moose, and camels have never - to anyone’s current knowledge - ever lived in Sri Lanka outside of a few very sad creatures in Dehiwala Zoological Gardens, south of Colombo, the resilient and much deserving target of most animal lovers’ ire. The island’s lions went extinct 38000 years ago if not more. Its tigers hippos, and rhinos vanished ever further back.

Undoubtedly remarkable and gorgeous through these luminous island mammals are, they star on other stages - not on this one. For this podcast is dedicated to those other mammals, ones still more extraordinary, that live far below the radar. Some are as common as Starbucks; others so rare as to cause rubies to fade and film stars falter. They are the island’s lost mammals: the dazzling Cinderella quadrupeds that few bipeds ever notice.

And endangered though so many of them are, they remain, like all Sri Lanka’s land mammals a breeding ground for argument.

The disputes start by attempting to settle on the actual number of land mammals on the island. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 103 mammals, endemic or otherwise, are found across Sri Lanka – but that number is a red rag to the tens of thousands of scientists with a passion for post 1700 CE Linnaean taxology. Some argue for more, others for less.

A much more relevant question would be, how many mammals are there likely to be in 2050? For survival is, of course, the critical question. As Darwin meant to say: “it is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” And change is demanding profoundly impossible things of the country’s diminishing mammals.

Over a third of the total mammals on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s list face such threats to their existence that they are more than likely to become extinct. Twenty-one species face so existential threat to their future existence that they are judged to be Endangered. These include such iconic mammals as the Sri Lankan Elephant, the Leopard and two of its most celebrated monkeys.

Nine others are teetering on the edge of becoming extinct in the wild - including the Sloth Bear and Golden Palm Civet. Six more, including the Ottar and the Tufted Gray Langur, are likely to face the prospect of being so vulnerable as to join these nine. Just over half the balance are judged to be of Least Concern – include thirteen shrews, mice, and rats, thirty bats, leaving what is left to own up to so little data as to be unclassifiable.

“Sometimes,” said Seneca, “even to live is an act of courage,” a sentiment of particular personal relevance to the philosopher who had been ordered to kill himself by Nero but made such a hash of it that it took several attempts and many hours to accomplish. But suicide is a peculiarly human undertaking. For Sri Lanka’s land mammals, their march to the precipice of oblivion is one prompted not by them but by human actions - poaching, deforestation, urbanization, pollution, and climate change.

What you see today, however ordinary, is likely to be suspended tomorrow. Superseded – and contracted. Which makes their observation now such a privilege and a thrill – be it a bat or rat, cat or shrew. Size, contrary to all rumours, really does not matter, whatsoever. Once you start to witness any creature every bit as entitled to share with you your scrap of earth, you move inexorably from a human centric view of life, to sometime more universal; and with it perhaps, the radical dawning and deeply shocking conclusion that neither of you has a greater right to have things just their way. “The world,” noted Yates, “is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

Bats, oddly enough, are the best place for an emergent Sri Lanan zoologist to start his or her observations, for Sri Lanka is bat country, its incredible range of environments supporting thirty of the world’s fourteen hundred bat species.

But of the many bats and bat families that live on the island, keep your picky eye focused on the appearance of just one. Should the Sri Lankan Woolly Bat fly across your binocular lens, then you are among the blessed for it is the country’s only endemic bat.

This tiny creature, barely fifty milometers from head to body, was first described by a tea planter, W.W.A. Phillips in 1932. It is said to enjoy sleeping in curled up banana fronds on hills between five hundred to a thousand metres, though its sightings are so rare that it has not been properly assessed for a score on the list of endangered animals.

Endeminicness aside, it is hard to exclude from any Sri Lankan bat list the infamous Common Flying Fox Bat - the megabats of the bat world. With a wingspan of one and a half metres and a weight of some 1.6 kilos, they effortlessly live up to their name. Nocturnal, fruit eating and curiously infecund (producing perhaps just one offspring per year), they are an unmistakable part of any skyline – especially around city parks where they gather at dusk to hang off trees. Although unlikely to turn suddenly into airborne artillery, they are best kept at a distance, harbouring as they do such a wealth of diseases as to make biological warfare warriors jealous.

Still more resolutely understated as bats are mice. The island is home to some 7 mouse species - but look out for just three; and give yourself champagne and chocolate eclairs should you ever be so fortunate to see one of them. They are of course hard to see – being so tiny. But harder still for these particular three are rarer than unicorns.

All three are endemic - Mayor’s Spiny Mouse (which actually comes into two distinct but impossible to tell apart variants); the very rare Sri Lankan Spiny Mouse; and the almost equally rare Ceylon Highland Long-Tailed Tree Mouse.

The Ceylon Highland Long-Tailed Tree Mouse was discovered in 1929 by the Dutch tea planter, Adriaan Constant Tutein-Nolthenius. Little more than twenty-one centimetres in length, nose to tail, it is found in Sri Lanka’s hill country where it lives in trees, venturing out only by night.

The Sri Lankan Spiny Mouse barely reaches eighteen centimetres in length, from nose to tail. Its reddish grey back and sides morph into white underparts, with huge gorgeous smooth scooped out ears that stand like parasols above large dark eyes. It is a mouse to fall in love with.

Mayor’s Spiny Mouse inhabits the smaller end of the mouse spectrum, and comes in two variants, one which inhabits the hill country; and one which prefers the low wetlands. Telling them apart is almost impossible, and both are covered with reddish grey fur and exhibit rather unsatisfactorily small ears. Seeing them is also a challenge for they are both nocturnal creatures. One of their more interesting (albeit worrying) points of difference to other mice is their capacity to carry quite so many other creatures on them – including mites, ticks, sucking louses and small scorpions.

Mice however, being cute, offer little of the challenge to the real animal lover that rats do for few people reserve a special place in t...