Sri Lanka, like ancient Rome, has strict - albeit invisible - notions of caste and class. And class, not being exclusively human, is no less apparent within its smaller mammalian world – its rodents, and rodent-like cousins: its rats, shrews, mice, and squirrels.

If the island’s tiny and elite mammalian senatorial class is represented by its elephants and leopards, its more capacious equestrian class comprises its monkeys, lorises, bears, mongooses, buffalo, anteaters, otters, jackals, hares, deer, civets, and wild cats.

Which, of course, leaves the plebs. Bottom of the pyramid they may have been, but the Roman pleb took nothing lying down. Famed for their resistance, resilience, and passion, there was little submissive, or demure about how they lived their lives. They were eminent, not intimidated. As are Sri Lanka’s rodents - who existence is anything but deferential or docile. And numbering over 30, they make up not just over a quarter of the island’s land living mammal species, but fifty percent of its endemic species too. To know them, is to know a key part of what really makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.

Naturally, plebs had a firm pecking order all of their own and at its apex stood the Tribunes of the plebs – the People’s Tribune, which in a mammalian context can only mean the rats. Like tribunes, rats are the busy, brisk, no-nonsense influencers of what really happens or doesn’t, and they abound in Sri Lanka. Their collective poor reputation and cordial hosting of many especially nasty diseases marks them out as a mammal best enjoyed from a distance, though as  Jo Nesbo observed, "a rat is neither good nor evil. It does what a rat has to do."

 Two of the island’s ten rat species are endemic. Thirty centimetres in length, nose to tail, with steel grey fur and white undersides, the Ohiya Rat is named after a small village of barely 700 souls near Badulla. It lives quietly in forests and has gradually become ever scarer in counts done by depressed biologists. Its only other endemic cousin, the Nillu Rat, is no less endangered, and today is only found in restricted highland locations such as the Knuckles, Horton Plains, and Nuwara Eliya. Little more than thirty nine centimetres length nose to tail, its fur tends to be slightly redder than the typical grey of many of its relatives. Its name – Nillu, which means cease/settle/ stay/stand/stop - gives something of a clue about its willingness to get out and about.

To these two are joined an embarrassment of other rat species, many common throughout the world, others restricted to South and Southeast Asia, and all much more successful in establishing an enduring dominance. These include the massive Greater Bandicoot Rat and its slightly smaller cousin the Lesser Bandicoot Rat. Measuring almost sixty centimetres in length nose to tail, the Greater Bandicoot Rat is in known in Sri Lanka as the Pig Rat. Aggressive, highly fertile, widespread, happy to eat practically anything and an enthusiastic carrier of many diseases, it is not the sort of creature to closely befriend. A marginally smaller giant of the rat world is the Lesser Bandicoot Rat, coming in at 40 centimetres length nose to tail. It is found in significant numbers throughout India and Sri Lanka and its fondness for burrowing in the farmlands and gardens its prefers to live within, has earnt it a reputation for destruction. It can be aggressive and is a reliable host to a range of nasty diseases including plague, typhus, leptospirosis, and salmonellosis.

The Black Rat or Rattus Rattus lives in all parts of Sri Lanka and comes in at least five distinct sub species - the Common House-Rat Rat , the Egyptian House Rat, the Indian House Rat, the Common Ceylon House Rat, and the Ceylon Highland Rat. None are much longer than thirty three centimetres nose to tail and despite their reputation for being black, also sport the occasional lighter brown fur. They are phenomenally successful, calling almost every country in the world their home, including Sri Lanka. They are also disconcertingly resilient transmitters for many diseases, their blood giving a home to a large quantity of infectious bacteria – including the bubonic plague.

Three other rats tend to restrict themselves more to South Asia - Blanford's Rat, the Indian Bush Rat, and the Indian Soft-Furred Rat. Indeed, Blanford's Rat, known also as White-Tailed Wood Rat, is found in impressive numbers throughout India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Measuring thirty five centimetres in length nose to tail, it has the classic grey fur of the kind of rat that scares most people. The Indian Bush Rat is also  found widely across Sri Lanka and India. It even boasts a tiny pocket sized colony in Iran. At twenty five centimetres in length nose to tail, it is smaller than many other rats and has rather beautiful fur that is speckled yellow, black, and reddish as if it had wandered out of a hair salon having been unable to make up its mind about what exact hair dye ask for, opting instead for a splash of everything. The ultimate C List celebrity, the beautiful Indian Soft Furred Rat, is more than happy to make its home at any altitude and almost any place from India, Nepal, and Pakistan to Sri Lanka. So ubiquitous and successful is it, that it lists as being of no concern whatsoever on the registers of environmentalists troubled by species decline. Barely 30 centimetres nose to tail, it has brown to yellow fur on its back and white across its tummy.

The devil of the rat world is undoubtedly the Brown Rat, which boasts a wide range of alterative names all associated either with Lucifer, Satan, Abaddon, Beelzebub, or streets, sewers, or wharfs. Immortalized by Dickens, it has been studied and domesticated more than most mammals and inhabits almost every continent of the world – not least Sri Lanka. It is large – over 50 centimetres nose to tail. It is happy to consume almost anything, is highly social, produces up to 5 litters a year and - according to the more informed scientists, is capable of positive emotional feelings. A final rat, Tatera Sinhaleya, known only from fossil records bade farewell to the island many thousands of years ago.

If rats are the tribunes of the mammalian world, then mice are certainly its aediles, a post in the Roman Republic reserved for men responsible for the upkeep of the city, and so, by nature, meticulous, attentive, persistent. Just like Sri Lanka’s seven mouse species, nearly half of which are also endemic. 

These endemic native and patriotic rodents are headed by the ultra-rare Sri Lankan Spiny Mouse. It is now so endangered that it can be seen in only  very few locations. A mere maximum of 18 centimetres 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.

The similar, and somewhat confusingly named, Mayor’s Spiny Mouse also inhabits the smaller end of the mouse spectrum and comes in two (still quite widespread) variants – Mus Mayori Mayori, which inhabit the hill country; and Mus Mayori Pococki 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 mouse difference is their capacity to carry quite so many other creatures on them: from mites, ticks, and sucking louses to small scorpions.

The last of the endemic mice is ...

Good parallels are not always obvious - and for Sri Lanka’s endemic mammals the best one to hand is the notorious Forth Bridge, a cantilevered railway bridge across the Firth of Forth in Scotland. It was opened in 1890 by the then Prince of Wales himself – and workers have yet to stop having to paint it.

So to with Sri Lanka’s endemic land mammals. 

Just when you have finished counting them you have to start all over again. Somewhere, with deft hands and glowing fervour, there is always to be found a scientist who has craftily and credibly reclassified the endemic civet into three distinct sub species; or added in a shrew recently discovered to have one toe longer than the rest, or a bat readmitted to the hallowed list after a much disputed and injurious explosion. 

Any number of endemic mammals from 19 to 40 is likely to be correct or totally wrong, depending on what the latest research papers have to say. The list of beasts presented in this account is, therefore, more of a vox pop than a static photograph. Its errs evangelistically on the side of generosity.  Of the 125 different species of land mammals that roam the island, about one third are endemic, counting amongst their rats, bats, civets, deer, mice, mongooses, rats, leopards, monkeys, lorises, and squirrels. But by any calculation that is an extraordinarily high number

Collectively, they may lack the innate glamour of a white tiger, the brooding menace of a yak or the familial delight of a Highland Gorilla; but they exude instead a profound and pleasing subtly, their apparent modest position in the Food Chain being as powerful an argument as any to cherish what is unique.

Unique – and threatened, for many if not all the country’s endemic mammals are threatened by a rising tide of habitat loss, pollution, and climate change. And this is where these mammals’ lack of obvious glitz cuts against them. Who cares if a shrew vanishes, or a bat ceases to fly? Not enough people – yet. 

Mr. Pooter notes in The Diary of a Nobody that  "one never loses by a good address" And so it is here, in a country so gladly patriotic, filled with creatures to celebrate.

Bat identification has become one of this island’s more exciting pastimes. For decades it was thought that the Sri Lankan Woolly Bat (Kerivoula Malpasi) was the country’s only endemic bat. This tiny creature, barely 50 mm 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 500 to 1000 metres, though its sightings are so rare that it has not been properly assessed for a score on the IUCN list of endangered animals. 

His celebrity was however rocked when in 2022 a new medium sized endemic bat was declared here - Phillip’s Long-Fingered Bat, which, until more eagled-eyed observers got to work was long thought to be a run-of-the-mill Eastern Bent-Winged Bat. 

Little is known about the Sri Lankan Leaf-Nosed Bat as it was only identified as a new endemic species in 2025, its existence until then having been clumsily muddled up with other cousins and near cousins. It tell-tale giveaways were its extra board nose, unusual ear shape, and the marginally different set to the bone structure of its tiny head.

Troubled by the sheer lack of scientific information about the behaviour of the Ceylon Spotted Deer (Axis Axis Ceylonensis), the Department of Zoology, at Sri Lanka’s Eastern University, conducted a detailed study of a particular population in Trincomalee. After months of observation, they concluded, reassuringly, that “their main activities were feeding and play.” 

Scientists are much divided on the subject of animal play, and tortured monographs have been written attempting to pin down the very concept of animal play. To some it is merely an evolutionary by product; others claim it ensures animals teach one another about fairness and consequences. That the Sri Lankan Axis Deer should be minded to play at all is encouraging for it an increasing vulnerable species, its preferred habitats - lowland forests, and shrub lands – shrinking, and with it the grasses, leaves, and fruit it lives on. 

Living in groups of 10 to 60 animals, their numbers are now counted in just several thousands. They live in herds of up to one hundred, and are seen by leopards, bears, crocodile, jackals, and hungry villagers, as living supermarkets of fresh meat. Standing up to a hundred centimetres high, their delicately white spotted fawn coats present them as everything a perfect deer ought to be, as is appropriate for an animal that is part of the island’s select few endemic mammals.

Although known collectively as chevrotains or mouse deer, these tiny mammals are generic gypsies, the DNA actually nestling somewhere between that of a pig and that of a deer. Solitary and little more than 1 to 4 kilos in weight and 18 inches in head to body length, they are the world’s smallest hoofed mammals. They live scattered in the forests of Sri Lanka, gorgeous looking – although popular superstition adds the terrible caveat that a man who gets scratched by the hind foot of a mouse deer will develop leprosy. This has yet to be fully verified by scientists.

Scientists have however spent a lot of time arguing over their endemic status and how they compare to their Indian cousin, the Indian chevrotain (Moschiola indica). 

The nearest in looks is the Sri Lankan White-Spotted Chevrotain - Moschiola meminna. Its separate identity was only confirmed as recently as 2005. White spots trail down its sides and back and three white bands cross its rump. Although it can be seen right across the island and in good numbers, it is so secretive and nocturnal that actually spotting one is a challenge. 

Its smaller and no less endemic cousin in Sri Lanka is the Yellow-Striped Chevrotain - Moschiola kathygre. Its colouration is golden brown rather than whiteish brown. Several horizontal rows of yellow spots run along its flanks, with bolder stripes on its haunches. It sticks mostly to the wetter parts of southwestern Sri Lanka, preferably rainforest, plantations, and rice paddies.

The rarified world of mouse deer enthusiasts was rocked recently by reports of a possible third endemic version of the chevrotain from Horton Palins. It was found to be much larger than other chevrotains and studies of its skull validated ther the status that it was a new chevrotain evolution. But blood test and other research is still being caried out in order to properly determine if this Mountain Mouse Deer, known as Meeminna in Singhala, is a new endemic species.

One of the island’s two civets, the Asian Palm Civet or Toddy Cat, is found in both Indian and Sri Lanka  but it around the identification of the second palm civet that scientists get most excited. 

When life was simple, long ago; and when beige, like black or white, came in just one colour choice, it was thought that the island was home to just one endemic palm civet. But scientists, zookeepers, and wildlife photographs like Dhammika Malsinghe, Dr. Wolfgang Dittus, Dr Devka Weerakoon, and Channa Rajapaksha have in the past fifteen years worked hard to evaluate this assumption. 

By careful observation, the checking of paw prints, the measurement of bodies and assessment of markings (beige or off-beige), they have instead come to the conclusion – now...

The mind blanks at the glare,” wrote Philip Larkin 

“Not in remorse    

—         The good not done, the love not given, time    

Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because    

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”

Larkin’s poem Aubade counts the cost of personal extension. But as Descartes might have gone onto conclude, with the value of hindsight, “If I don’t exist then everything else probably can.”  For it is by being human that we are triggering the party to which no-one desires an invitation, the earth greatest extinction event.

We were not of course responsible for the earlier ones but for anyone fond of models, they all offer scenarios that even Hollywood would balk at.

The first of these events, the Late Devonian extinction (383-359 million years ago) killed off about 75 percent of all living species.

One hundred million years later came the worst of all – the Permian-Triassic extinction, or Great Dying. This despatched 96% of all marine animals and 3 out of every 4 land animals that had managed to flourish since the previous extinction.

After fifty-one million years of later exhaustive recovery, the Triassic-Jurassic extinction swept down, exterminating 80% of all living species.

 All three, it seems, were caused by the climate change sparked by volcanic eruptions and shifting plate tectonics.

The last, and most famous mass extinction, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, 66 million years ago, was the one that claimed the life of the dinosaurs – and with them 76% of all earth’s species. For this a wandering asteroid was probably to blame.

The credit for the next one is one we as a race must step up to take, the winner of the Oscars from Hell. Already the stage is being set, the tables set for the Oscars ceremony, the red carpet laid out, the invitations being sent for the pre and post ceremony parties, the Governors Ball, the Vanity Fair Party, cocktails in the Diamond 25 Lounge.

Invitations have already reached many in Sri Lanka. Anteaters, jackets, bears, otters, fishing cats, civets, axis deer, lorises  and Toque Macaque have already propped up their gold embossed cards on their jungle mantelpieces. As have the Ceylon Highland Long Tailed Tree and Spiny Mice, the tiny Serendib Scops Owl, the Nillu and Ohiya Rats, the Dusky Striped Squirrel and the Ceylon Highland, Pigmy and Long-Tailed Shrews. Even the Ceylon Tree Skink had received an invitation to this perdition party.

The big beasts are of course, especially invited; and the island’s elephants are the guest of honour. Before the British arrived, there were over 15,000 elephants in Sri Lanka – until that is big game hunting became fashionable. Its most notorious celebrity was a government agent, a Major Thomas Rogers who manged to kill 1400 elephants in just 11 years. “His whole house,” recalled one appalled guest in the 1840s  “was filled with ivory, for amongst the hosts of the slain more than sixty were tusked elephants… At each door of his veranda stood huge tusks, while in his dining room every corner was adorned with similar trophies…”  Mercifully killed at just 41 years, Rogers’ grave, still to be found beside the gold course in Nuwara Eliya, offered him little by way of eternal rest as it has been stuck by lightening over 100 times, indicating one of the silver linings of climate change.

Today the island lays claim to less than half that pre-colonial number of elephants, with the BBC recently reporting that nearly 500 are dying annually, half of them at the hands of humans. The maths for continued survival looks little better for the equally famous Sri Lankan leopard, now reduced to around 800 adults and desperately trying to recover from a 75% population decline during ther 20th century.

All across the globe, the more modest number crunchers calculate that a million species of plants and animals are facing total extinction. This seems especially impossible to be true in the fecund space of this island, which is so full of life, its appears as if nothing can ever end. Yet it can. It does. It has. From shore to shore lurk the traces exist of previous extinctions, their wrath like imprint plotting a course as much forwards as it does back.

Even so, and despite owning to pre Cambrian rocks of such antiquity they were old when Gondwana was young and producing the clearest evidence across the whole of South Asia for the first Homo sapiens, planetology is still a science that has far more to yield. 

Much of what little we know about the island’s earliest history and its extinct animals dates back to the remarkable work carried out between the 1930s and 1963 by P. E. P. Deraniyagala, Director of National Museums. Uncommonly hands-on for so senior a civil servant, his life work was spent examining the alluvial strata better known for concealing gems around Rathnapura. Within its sandy layers he uncovered fossils, fragments, teeth, and bones daring right back to the Pleistocene, when Sri Lanka was still– just about – joined physically to the Indian landmass and when the melting ice sheets caused the creation of these alluvial beds.

His work, and that of his successors, including his son Siran, uncovered the existence of animals that pointed back to an island that was very different to the one here to today. Not just animals – but people too. The discovery of what is now termed Balangoda Man reliably dated human existence on the island to 30,000 years ago, with further island evidence showing that “in Sri Lanka, prehistoric man has lived at least 125,000 years ago with the possibility of existence as far back as 500,000 years ago. Advanced 'microlithic' tool making technology had already been developed in Sri Lanka 30,000 years ago, when Europe was still dreaming of this technology which arose there only about 12,000 years ago.”

Humans have of course flourished here since then – but not so some of the mammals that these palaeontologists also found. The most iconic of these was the Ceylon Lion. Now adorning the national flag, the Sri Lankan lion is thought to have become extinct in 37,000 BCE – about the same time as Balangoda Man walked his last steps. Panthera Leo Sinhaleyus, as the sub species is known, came to light in 1936 when P.E.P. Deraniyagala, uncovered two fossilized teeth in Kuruwita, near Ratnapura. With the passion of a forensic detection, the archaeologist studied his modest clutch of teeth. One was so damaged as to be of little use in identifying the animal, but the other, a left molar, presented so distinctive a structure as to not just twin it with lions, but set it apart from all known species too. From this single tooth, a lost sub species was uncovered, its size indicating that the beast was a lion much larger than the present Indian lion. Back in 37,000 BCE, Sri Lanka was a very different place to what it would become, an island of open grasslands a habitat perfect for lions. But over time, as the monsoon rainforest fuelled the proliferation of trees, its habitat become ever more restricted and at some point, the creature just died out. 

&nbs...

Sri Lanka’s 14 great rivers offer a rarely explored opportunity to unearth its history and its greatest dishes - morish reminders that rivers, being all about life, prove there is no better way to experience it than to eat  or drink it

This was something that Winne-the-Poos’s dear friend Eeyore knew all about, having famously fallen into the river.

“Oh, Eeyore, you are wet!” said Piglet, feeling him. Eeyore shook himself and asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had been inside a river for quite a long time.”  

Presented with a honey jar by Winne the Pooh, Eeyore would have known what any Sri Lankan Vedda could have told him: that honey was not just yummy but perfect too for preserving meat. The Vedda, Sri Lanka’s Aboriginal community, still exists.  Descended from the county’s stone age hunter gathers, they make up 1% of the population, a community with strong animist beliefs that has, against all the odds, retained some part of its distinctive identity. Honey and meat, wild at that, and mostly wild boar, is one of their preferred dishes and the history of some of the very earliest Vedda tribes can be traced around the watershed of the Maduru Oya.  

At 136 kilometres, the Maduru Oya is the country’s eighth longest river, collecting its waters in the mountains beyond Mahiyan ganaya, halfway from Kandy to the Indian Ocean at Batticaloa. The streams around its collection points are much revered, being said to have once hosted Lord Buddha himself who came to settle a land and water dispute between warring Vedda tribes. Their fondness for wild boar has endured and the meat is a popular curry dish in Sri Lanka – dark and spicy, marinated in turmeric, chilli, pepper, ginger, lemon grass and pandam leaves.  Known as Ela Mas Curry, it is usually made as a dry curry, so that the gamey flavour of the wild boar dominate.

All along the dry scrubland banks that enclose the Maduru Oya are the ruins of the outer most reaches of the Anuradhapuran Kingdom – including 6th century irrigation structures bisokotuwas, built to maximise drainage- that it took the west a hundred years more to invent.  The Maduru Oya drains out at Kalkudah, a small town surrounded by beaches still abandoned since the ending of the civil war.  

The Vedda were just the first of many people appreciate the pivotal importance of the country’s rivers – for if ever a country can be said to have been made by its rivers, it is Sri Lanka. It was by harnessing their fecund power that its first kings fuelled their kingdom with the benefits of plentiful agriculture. Urbanization, trade, religion, buildings, and society itself all came from a society that was able to grow its most basic crops with assured regularity. Indeed, so great was the sophistication of the techniques used to trap, store and distribute the waters across the kingdom, that it allowed the kings to build, and go on building in Anuradhapura, the city that for almost 1,500 would govern the island and whose bewitching influences would dazzle the kings and countries in lands right across the Indian Ocean.

Water management became a national obsession.  The Vedda began this rare expertise which was perfected during the Anduraupuran era. Rivers were dammed, massive tanks and reservoirs dug out, and canals and water streams cut in gradients of breathtaking precision using a tank cascade system dating back to the first century BCE. Even the trees and bushes that grew along the water’s edge were carefully selected to deter evaporation and loss. It is therefore unsurprising that almost sixty percent of the power generated now comes from hydroelectricity.

No river best exemplifies this history than the Malvathu River.  At 164 kilometres, the Malvathu is the country’s second largest river, and was what the Tiber was to Rome, the Thames to London or the Nile to Egypt. Spiling from the streams around Dambulla and Sigiriya, it flowed onto Anuradhapura, connecting the capital with what Ptolemy mapped in the 2nd century CE as Medettu - the port of Mannar, the maritime gateway to the island. 

Much of the ancient port now lies beneath the sea - but once, through its roads and the Malvathu River came gems, pearls, cinnamon, elephants, and spices, packed up for export. 

And back came a royal princess in the 5th century BCE to marry the county’s first Singhala king; warrior Tamil invaders; merchants and emissaries from Persia, China, and Rome. 

Today the river knows no such glamour, harnessed by water resource schemes and travelling through lands long forgotten by the mainstream, to provide the workaday water solutions needed by the farmers and settlements around its banks. But in memory of those marvellous ancient royal times, is the inspirational Thirty Two Curry Feast, a dish favoured by the island’s early kings.  This gargantuan feast required its partakers to eat 32 mouthfuls of red rice, each with a different curry. Fish, chicken, beef, lentils, jackfruit, pumpkin – all were simmered, slow cooked, roasted, steamed, and tempered with every possible spice from tamarind, cinnamon and fenugreek to pepper and coriander.  Oceans of coconut milk were added.  Its more modest and – from a medical point of view – acceptable descendant is the traditional Sri Lankan Village rice and curry – a capacious set of dishes that varies from place to place  and fills many happy hours.

Twenty-four massive dams and over 20 vast reservoirs lie behind modern Sri Lanka’s energy grid, backed up by over 60 smaller dams and 18,000 smaller tanks and reservoirs, many going back well over a thousand years. With an average rainfall of over 1,700 millimetres per year, Sri Lanka receives more rain than all European and most African and Asian countries.  Dams and reservoirs are still being built today – with one especially massive new entrant slated for the waters of the Kumbukkan Oya. At 116 kilometres, the Kumbukkan Oya is the country’s twelfth longest river, collecting its waters near the blameless hill town of Lunugala and flowing out into the Indian Ocean at Kumana National Park through a series of lagoons shallow brackish tanks. This is home to many visiting and endemic birds including the black-necked stork, and the exhausted pintail snipe that will have travelled over 10,000 kilometres to escape the Siberian winter. 

Quite how the area will survive the proposed Kumbukkan Oya development project, which aims to create a reservoir of almost 50 million cubic metres of water, has yet to be fathomed.  The river collects its waters around Monaragala, a lush area in the south east of the island and famous for the antiquity of its Muslim community.  Muslims make up the second largest ethnic group here and have a history that goes back well over 500 years. The area is dotted with old mosques and shrines, its folklore rich with Islamic story lines and the countryside sprinkled with the very distinct archaeology of the community.  It is the perfect place to order up Watalappam – the islands most popular pudding.  Made with eggs, coconut milk, jaggery, nutmeg and cardamom, the dessert arrived on the island with the Malay Moors, the Muslims of Indonesia  who knew it as srikaya, a festive dish favoured for Eid.

Not all Sri Lanka’s guest arrivals or river folk were so benign. The Chinese, one of the island’s lesser known invaders, can be traced to a river, and to food, to HBC or Hot Butter Cuttlefish.  This popular starter is made with deep fried squid or cuttlefish and enliven...

It is  all too easy to mistake what Sri Lankans might call the “Three Big B’s” for Mr Bandaranaike Senior, Mrs Bandaranaike Senior, and Mrs Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. But in fact Sri Lanka’s Three Big B’s are not politicians. They are its bears, buffalo, and boars. 

And remarkably, each beast shares a close and starting affinity with those other and still more famous Big Three “B’s” of the classical music world:  Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. 

The buffalo, that most solid, refined, and traditional of creatures ever seen in all corners of the island is the Bach of the mammalian world. 

The wild boar, with its laudable pack control, and mastery over its environment, is the unmistakable Brahams of jungle and grassland, blending the complexity of the world around it with ease.

And the bear, of course, is the Beethoven of the country: powerful, introspective, heroic.

 “It seems,” wrote Beethoven in his most bear-like mood, “as if every tree Said to me 'Holy! Holy!' Who can ever express The ecstasy of the woods! Almighty One, In the woods I am blessed.”  

As too to is the Sri Lanka Sloth Bear. Although it is most often found in the dry zones of the country – such as Yala and Wilpattu – it is never far from trees, for in the trees it finds the ants, honey, and fruit its especially loves. 

Hanging like the strangest of fruits itself, they will stay in the branches for hours at a time, often bringing cubs with them to join the feast.  Having feasted, it will often then continue to hang on in the most relaxed of ways, enabled by twenty sharp curved claws that give them the kind of grip that denture wearers can only dream about. 

To see one suspended in so complete a seventh heaven is of course to call immediately to mind the Allegretto or "Shepherd's song” from Beethoven’s Pastoral itself – that moment when all that remains is pure gratitude and celebration of the tranquillity of the natural world.

Even so, the bear is easily tempted to descend from its high table for termites – a food item of indulgent delight, for which their highly mobile snouts are especially well designed. With nostrils closed, the snouts become vacuums, sucking out the termites from their nest. And their long claws enable them to dig the nest ever deeper till the last juicy termite has been consumed. 

Sri Lanka’s Sloth Bear is a unique endemic sub species of the very same sloth bear that inhabits the Indian subcontinent in ever declining numbers from India to Bhutan, Nepal, and, until recently Bangladesh. 

It is a little smaller in size than its Indian cousin, with shorter fur and, sadly, sometimes without the cuddly-looking white tummy fur of its northern relative. Even so, it is no midget, typically measuring six feet in length and weighing in at up to 300 pounds for a male or 200 for a female. 

Once found in plentiful numbers across the island, they are now in serious and significant retreat, with an estimated 500-1000 bears in the wild today. The destruction of their habitats has been instrumental in their decline, but the fear they engender amongst village populations has also played it part. They are often hunted and killed, with a reputation for damaging property and killing or maiming domestic animals humans running like a wave of terror before them. 

The “sloth” part of their name is rather misleading for the bears are quite capable of reaching speeds of thirty miles an hour – faster than the fastest human yet recorded. 

Evolution has cast the sloth bear towards the Grumpy Old Man side of the mammalian spectrum – brooding, bothered and bold, as if Beethoven’s late soul searching Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111 had assumed a furry life of its own. Its poor sight and hearing leaves it very dependent on its sense of smell, so it can all too often be surprised by what seems like the abrupt appearance of something threating – like a human – which it will attack with warrior like ferocity before asking any questions. In this the bear

It is very solitary, living alone in the forest except for those rare moments when it seeks a mate. Reproduction is not its strongest skill, and most females produce a single cub that stays with them for two to three years, the first months of which are endearingly spent living or travelling on its mothers back. 

D.J.G Hennessy, a policeman who had a couple of bears on his land in Horowapotana in 1939, noted the emotive articulateness of their paw suckling.  Hed wrote that “ the significance of the notes on which the bear sucks his paw is interesting; a high whine and rapid sucking denotes impatience and anger, a deep note like the humming of a hive full of bees on a summer’s day indicates that he is contented and pleased with life, a barely audible note shows great happiness while a silent suck in which he usually indulges in just before going to sleep on a full stomach denotes the acme of bliss”.  It was as if, Hennessy might have added, had he been as musically minded as he was bear minded, the bear was playing out his own version of the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 - the "Ode to Joy".

Just as Brahms was seen to take Beethoven’s music to its best and logical conclusion, so too does the Sri Lankan Wild Boar complete some of the limitations of the sloth bear. For unlike the bear, the boar is exquisitely social, living in groups – or sounders, a word that originates from 14th century Norman French to collectivize a group of wild pigs who communicate constantly with grunts and squeals.

Like the famous Mosuo from the Yongning lakes of China – one of the world's last remaining matrilineal societies – wild boar packs are centred around an old and necessarily dominant sow who in charge of all that they get up to – where they rest or eat, wallow, swim, play or grub. Each sounder pack is made up of several generations of boar – all females and younger males, often numbering 20 beasts. By at least their second year, the males will lope off to live alone, like blokes in sheds, returning to the sounder merely to mate, although some have been known to form temporary bachelor groups, like flat-shares for men learning to break free.

Mating, like all good things, follows the weather patterns, with most encounters happening during the monsoon from September to early March; and very little if anything happening during the dry seasons of June to August.  Occasionally the more eager beasts produce two litters a year, but one is the norm, relying on the not inconsiderable investment of a 100+ day period of gestation and usually 6 little piglets to show for the effort. And in true Mosuo style, where couples living in close domestic harmony and fathers staying to be a key part of the household is regarded as a shocking eccentricity, the male boar, having done his bit, will jog off back to his introverted life.

Their communicative skills are not unlike those of Brahams himself – with a  sound scope that moves from the softest pianissimos to the loudest fortissimos by way of full harmonies, raw registers, and lush orchestration. Low to medium frequency grunts maintain group cohesion. Soft purring denotes contentment, and rhythmic grunts courtship. Low frequency growls suggest aggression; squeaks and squeals excitement, their rising amplitude indicating distress rather than elation. A low huffing “Uhk” is the alarm call. In hearing all this all together it is as if the sounding has become an orchestra of its own, one busy playing Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 where the final movement is entirely developed to 30 variations on a Bach cantata.

Sri Lanka’s wild boar is most magnificently differentiated from its Indian cousin, with whom it coexists on the island, by a crested mane that runs fr...

Cryptology, fractals, even Einstein’s Theory of Relatively – they all pale into bashful insignificance when compared to bat taxology. Between the kingdom within which a bat might exist, to the species to which it is classed as belonging, there are at least 8 levels of mind-numbing grouping that bat scientists, or chiropterologists as they prefer to be called, pin their descriptions to. Unwilling to rest there, many then spend entire careers reordering the species, family and even the genus of these miniature mammals. The more daring go much further and bestow new sub species divisions with all the generosity of a pools winner.

The net result is that this most tiny of all mammals has had - and continues to endure - more names changes than even the hapless city of Plovdiv in Bulgaria. This blameless city of some 350,000 souls, famous for its icon painting, has endured 11 name changes so far. Somewhat co-incidentally it is also renowned for its bats, housing over 20 different spcies and hosting regular Bat Nights to introduce its avian mammals to its two-legged ones.

Short of dusting the animals with poisonous radioactive dust and equipping them with miniature Kalashnikov, there is little else science can really do to make them more unapproachable. Which is a terrible shame because bats – like lichen, coral, or bees - are among the world’s best indicator species, those ones that tell you quite how healthy or not the environment really is. 

Chiropterologists aside, we ought to pay attention to what is going on in the bat world for if what have bats have to say is anything to go by, then we are in trouble. All around the world bats are in decline. Facing a tsunami of pollution, habitat loss, climate change, and aggressive new farming techniques, bat numbers in every country of the world have plummeted and the continued future existence of almost one third of their species is threatened. It is ironic that in the face of such a burgeoning catastrophe, the number of identifiably different bat spcies continues to grow – it is now up to over 1500.

The counting of bat species in Sri Lanka is an art still much in the making, but all the signs are that the overall decline of numbers non withstanding, the country bats way above its weight. Though owning barely 1% of the world total land mass, Sri Lankan houses well over 2% of the recognised bat species across the world. 

Scientists are of course minded to disagree with one another at most times; indeed, put just one Chiropterologist in a room by himself and you will foster dissent. This is especially true when it comes to nailing down the number of bat species that exist here. It was thought to be 28. Then 29. Several new bats were discovered. Older bats were reclassified. Today the number appears to be 37, though like adolescents with mood swings, this can change in an instant and often does.

But whatever family, genius, species, or sub species they belong to, they all share certain bat-like sureties. They all fly, for example. Bats are of course the only mammals able to truly fly, angels excepted and are famous for roosting upside down from their feet, viewing the world like happy drunks, a propensity make worse by their extremely poor vision. They all enjoy ultrasonic sound and with this gift of super charged hearing, they navigate the world with expert dexterity. Most live in large colonies and are much given to hibernation, a habit that accounts for their exceptionally long lifespan – with one bat recorded to have lived 41 years. Less happily, many are enthusiastic harbingers of diseases, especially those best able to leap from animal to human. 

XS
 The Extra Small Bats

Sri Lanka’s bats can best be divided to eight broad categories, the first of which are the extremely small bats, the ones so extraordinary petit that their bodies barely measure 2 to 3 centimetres. There are 3 bats in the XS range, the smallest being the Indian Pygmy Pipistrelle Bat, whose Latin name (mimus mimus) is all the guidance you really need to know quite how tiny it is. Next up in size is the Painted Bat, sometimes known as the butterfly bat. Small though it is, the creature is also dazzlingly beautiful with thick bright orange fur all over, its wings decorated with black pyramids inset on orange lines like stained glass windows. Decidedly less glamorous is the rust brown Pungent Pipistrelle, common in SE Asia but rarely found in Sri Lanka. The more exacting scientists have long ago declaring its few sightings here to have been avoidable mistakes. The third XS bat, Hardwicke's Forest Bat, is one of those wretched beasts whose existence has been especially tortured by name changes and reclassifications. The most recent occurrence was in 2018 when it was dragged out of one species and reallocated to an another under the name The Malpas Bat. Unlike most other bats, Hardwicke's Forest Bat is something of a loner. It was named after the East India Company soldier, Major-General Thomas Hardwicke, a man as much noted for his love of natural history as for his determination to defeat Tipu Sultan in battles across India. Like many East India men, Hardwicke he had a complicated domestic life, leaving behind five illegitimate children and two other daughters born to his Indian mistress.

S

Bats of Small Size

Eight bats populate Sri Lanka’s Small Bat category, their sizes averaging around 4 centimetres with upper ranges for some of up to 6 centimetres. The Indian Pipistrelle stands out, despite its size, for its rampant fertility. Most bats give birth once a year – usually to a single pup. The Indian Pipistrelle however opts to do this three times a year. Dull orange with a worrying tendency to beige, the Fulvus Roundleaf Bat follows bat reproductive norms more exactly, breeding in November, to produce a single pup who will take well over a year to gain sexual maturity. 

Little is known about the third XS bat, the Sri Lankan Leaf-Nosed Bat as it was only identified as a new endemic species in 2025, its existence until then having been clumsily muddled up with other cousins and near cousins. It tell-tale giveaways were its extra board nose, unusual ear shape, and the marginally different set to the bone structure of its tiny head. 

The same sorry fate was to befall the Dekhan Leaf-Nosed Bat which, until 2025, has been horribly confused with several other species to which it only had  a nodding acquaintanceship. It is regarded as critically endangered and most scientists believe that it doesn’t actually exist in Sri Lanka at all. Most that is, but not quite all. Such rarity does not haunt Schneider’s Leaf-nosed Bat  wo lives in colonies with around 1000 mates in caves across Sri Lanka.

The Rufous Horseshoe Bat, beautifully orange though it is, remains one to be avoided, being responsible for the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak. Van Hasselt’s Mouse-Eared Bat  was named for the great biologist Johan Conrad van Hasselt, whose wretched reputation  was such that almost everyone who joined him for expeditions into the unknown died or returned with a terminal illness, himself included. 

His little bat is unusual for its fondness for living near water, alone. More social is Cantor's Leaf-Nosed Bat, named for a Danish zoologist more famous for having nailed the taxological complexities of Siamese fighting fish. 

M

Bats of Medium Size

Four baths fill the medium size bat category, though medium means little more than between 5 to five a...

The most discerning of mammal spotters in Sri Lanka pursue neither the elephant, monkey nor leopard.  Instead, they seek encounters with those five mammals that live in plain sight almost everywhere – the ones that can be spotted from a tuk tuk, a veranda, a city park, or riverbank. Free of drama, subterfuge, or infuriating modesty, all five can be added daily – indeed, repeatedly – to that invisible and life affirming tally that tips life just a little further away from the claustrophobic norms of humankind. 

The first and most common of these creatures is the porcupine, known to the consternation of proto nationalists as the Indian Crested Porcupine. It is found is found right across Sri Lanka - and India. 

Nikita Khrushchev, the bombastic Russian leader, was unexpectedly wise to the beast, stating to his enemies that “if you start throwing hedgehogs at me, I shall throw a couple of porcupines under you.“ Up to three feet long and sixteen kilos in weight, they are, like Khrushchev, highly territorial. 

When their feel threated or their territory is unacceptably encroached upon, their sharp quills will spring up, and they will go on the attack. Nocturnal, and usually hidden in the burrows that are their homes, they are eager consumers of bark, fruit, berries, vegetables and almost most plants in gardens and plantations. Gratifyingly monogamous, their pregnancies last eight months and the two to four cubs that are born live on with the parents until they are two or three years old. 

Fossilised records from thousands of years ago show that the present porcupine once had an ancestor similar though smaller to its form today, the Hystrix Sivalensis Sinhaleyus. No linguist has yet come forward to show whether or not this antique version of today’s porcupine would have been able to talk to its modern heir. But it is more than likely, not least because the language of porcupines is far removed from the vagaries that force most human languages to bend, evolve, or corrupt. 

Even when alone porcupine are astonishingly chatty and keep themselves entertained with a wide range of grunts, whines, moans, snorts, and murmurs. Inter porcupine communication happens more naturally at the mating season, a time joyfully characterised by shattering shrieks and screams. Wailing and a clattering of teeth is a racket saved for predators.  For one-on-one inter porcupine fights – more common when two males are in ardent courtship of a single female, they will add to their usual litany of noises a deafening set of howls and screams. 

Pangolins, however, the second of the island’s manifest mammals, or scaley anteaters as they are also called, have an almost wholly different array of sounds that they use to get through their day. Of the many blessings given to them by the good lord, sight, sadly, was not one of them. Their tiny eyes are covered by the thickest of eye lids - a sort of anti-termite defence – and their vision is poor to myopic. It semes that as the animal because ever more nocturnal, its eyesight decreased accordingly, proving once again that evolution, unlike one’s bank account, can always keep up with events. 

It is sound and smell therefore that gives the beast all the guiding lights it needs to flourish. Their hearing is acute and their noses, bristling with the most powerful of scent sensors, sit at the end of exceptionally long snouts. They can find their way into ant or termite nests, however far underground, eyes closed. Given that their sticky tongues can stretch for almost 28 inches, the blighted insects have little option but to surrender themselves gracefully as supper – some 70 million a year per pangolin, on the count of one exhausted scientist.

On the auditory front the pangolin repertoire of sound is all hisses, whimpers, snuffles, and sniffs – a breathier orchestration when compared to porcupines. If disturbed, they hiss and chuff in deep breaths. Snorting is often used in place of hallo to a fellow pangolin, and happy contented grunts accompany their dining.

Pangopups are much given to whimpering as a way of communicating with their mothers though no one has yet deciphered the sheer variety of whimpers recorded in order to ascertain what sort of whimper is slated for what sort of inter family statement.  Pregnancies last around two months and the pangopup (for there is usually only one) gets carried on its mother’s tail until it is able to move around confidently. 

Pangolins reserve their most arresting sound for when they are most really alarmed. Curling themselves into a ball they will rubs their hard scales together to generate a unique jungle maraca commotion. This is often accompanied by the ejection of an exceptionally noxious acid smelling liquid distilled in glands near their anus. It is hard to clean off, the obvious lesson being, never shock a pangolin, especially before a date.

But of course the most immediately exciting thing about spotting a pangolin is not their smell or sound – but their looks. Clothed in dexterous overlapping and generously rounded scales, they are a unique cross between an architectural marvel, a desert tank, and a Viking warrior clad in chain mail. 

Measuring some fix feet nose to tail, pangolins make their home in burrows in rainforest and grassland and even modest hill country - right across the Indian subcontinent and all across Sri Lanka. Even so, they may soon drop off the Manifest Mammals list as they have become increasingly threatened – as much by the habitat loss that is affecting almost all animals on the island, as by illegal poaching. Its meat is seen as a luxurious bush meat to jazz up the jaded appetites of decadent diners. And its scales are prized in Chinese and traditional medicines for all manner of disorders for which there is not a single shred of supporting or validating evidence. It skins are routinely butchered into rings, charms or crafted in grisly leather goods, like boots and shoes that shame their wearers more than they might be if caught dancing naked down Galle Face Green on the top of big red bus.

Such predatory and pointless threats are more understandably avoided by the third of the island’s manifest mammals – the jackal with whom the word cherish has yet to find much of a home. “It is far better,” wrote Tipu Sultan, shortly before being killed by the future Duke of Wellington in Srirangapatna in 1799, “to live like a lion for a day then to live like a jackal for hundred years”. 

The Sultan, who of course, saw himself as the lion, was merely channelling the unrelentingly poor press that jackals have endured since recorded time - in Arabic holy writ, the Bible; even in Buddhist Pali literature which depicts them as inferior, greedy, cunning creatures. 

Despite accruing the sort of headlines beloved of the Daily Mail, the Sri Lankan Jackel is second only to the Leopard in the pecking order of island predators. And Sri Lankan it is, to its very paws, for the Sri Lankan jackal differences from its Indian cousin, the Soutth Indian Golden Jackal, by virtue of its marginally greater size, the rooted lobe on the inner side of the third upper premolar (a peculiarity to capture the attention of the more discerning spotters) and a darker less shaggy coat all round.

It is a skilled hunter, and, like a wolf, a pack animal that will eat anything from rodents, birds, and mice to young gazelles, reptiles, and even fruit. It is also an admirable scavenger, good a...

It was Shakespeare’s Enobarbus who remarked of Queen Cleopatra that “age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.”  But in this observation Anthony’s wise and cynical confident was only half right – for age is as much a skilful creator of variety, as it is of value; if Sri Lanka’s famous gems are anything to go by. And Queen Cleopatra herself – apart from a nightclub in downtown Colombo and an elderly female leopard in Wilpattu – has yet to make much of a mark on the island.

The island is home to 75 semi or precious gems – including two precious stones - rubies and sapphires, the latter being the gem that is unmistakably twinned with in popular imagination. Amongst its better known semi-precious stones are Spinels, Amethysts, Sapphires, Garnets, Rose Quartz, Aquamarines, Tourmalines, Agates, Cymophanes, Topazes, Citrines, Alexandrites, Zircons, and Moonstones. All are valued according to a strict criteria: Cut, Colour, Clarity, and Carat  - or weight.

Thanks to the extreme old age of its rocks (90% are between 500 to 2.5 million years old), Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous as to often just wash out onto flood plains, and into rivers and streams. 

Indeed, the mining of alluvial deposits by simple water-winnowing river mining was for long the classic technique used to find gemstones, separating them out from the river sand and clay by simple sluicing in wicker baskets. 

Tunnel mining represents a more scalable technique. Typically, pits of 5 to 500 feet in depth are dug, with tunnels excavated horizontally from them. The clay, sand and gravel is then sluiced with water in conical baskets to separate out the heaver stones that then settle at the basket base. At a much more industrial level, backhoe earthmover machines, ablaze in their environmentally challenging acid yellow or orange livery, are used to excavate the topsoil.

Twenty five percent of the country’s total land area is potentially gem-bearing, but the greatest concentration of mining is around the town of Ratnapura which accounts for 65% of mined gems, the balance mostly coming from Elahera, a district in the North Central Province.

The country’s gem mining history reaches back to at least the 2nd century BCE, with the mention of a gem mine in The Mahavamsa. However, if biblical rumours of King Solomon’s wooing of the Queen of Sheba with gifts of priceless Sri Lankan gems, are to be believed, the country’s gem mines can be back dated at least another 700 years. In 550 CE a Greek trader, Cosmas, wrote that "the temples are numerous, and in one in particular, situated on an eminence, is the great hyacinth [amethyst or ruby], as large as a pine cone, the colour of fire, and flashing from a great distance, especially when catching the beams of the sun - a matchless sight".

A later traveller to the island, Marco Polo, wrote in the 13th century CE that "the king of Ceylon is reputed to have the grandest ruby that was ever seen, a span in length, the thickness of a man's arm; brilliant beyond description, and without a single flaw. He gives them to the lapidaries who scrape them down until they split away from the ruby stones. Some of them are red, some yellow, and some blue, which they call nailam (saffires)". Today, the country’s gem industry is high regulated, and its exports are one of the country’s main foreign revenue earners, with sales escalating from around $40 million in 1980 to over $473 million in 2022. This places it in 4th position, below that of Garments ($4.7 billion); Coffee, Tea & Spices ($1.6 billion); and Rubber ($1.06 billion).

This phenomenal acceleration dates in part to two bouts of government intervention: the establishment of the State Gem Corporation in 1971 and the 1993 Gem and Jewellery Authority Act. By these moves, the government centralised and professionalised the issuing of gem-mining licenses and the l easing government land for mining. They extended control over sales and exporting and made it mandatory that gems discovered within mines could be sold arbitrarily; but must instead be presented at public auctions, with the government receiving a share of sales amounting to 2.5%.

The industry’s value chain is a long one. Gem miners sell their stones to dealers, who sell the rough stones to cutter polishers. Historically, these have usually been Ceylon Moors descendants of Arabians traders. The glittering stones are then sold to wholesalers and onto retailers, where the greatest profits are to be made.

The two stones that stand like guardians of the jewellery vault in Sri Lanka are of course sapphire and rubies.

So great is the affinity between Sri Lanka and its sapphires that the nation might legitimately put in for a name change to be better called Sri Sapphire. They are most typically blue – but can also pop up black, colourless, grey, or even pink, orange – a variant known as padparadscha – from Padmaraga. 

The country also excels at producing Hot Pink Sapphires, a yellow sapphire that is apparently a good deterrent against witchcraft, orange, and white ones. The gem accounts for 85% of the precious stones mined in Sri Lanka – but the colour variant that gets the most acclaim is the Ceylon Blue Sapphire, the blue of cornflowers, clear skies, and inestimable, sophisticated material contentment. 

Selling for $5,000 - 8,000 per carat, they are as much statements of investment as they are items of adornment: “A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good,” noted Anita Loos, “but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever”. 

Sri Lanka’s sapphires are found in alluvial deposits across the country, the very best from Elahera. Since Ptolemy noted their glittering existence, they are much favoured for crowns, thrones, diadems, as well as jewellery for First Nights and cocktail parties.

Sri Lanka’s sapphires have won their place in global hearts since the very earliest times due to their exceptional clarity and transparency. For any wearer interested in absolute quality, they are the go-to source for best-bling, shorn as they are of the incipient vulgarity that often accompanies diamonds. Not coincidently, Sri Lanka’s sapphires have given museums and auction houses jewels of such arresting quality as to gain themselves names and identities in the own right – including The Stuart Sapphire, still worn atop the crown of the reigning monarch of Great Britain, though the oldest and loveliest is probably the Roman Aphrodite Sapphire now housed behind thick glass in Cambridge.

Closely related to sapphires, the island’s rubies are almost as famous. Grey, hard, and brittle, known to scientists as Cr or No 24, the modest metal, chromium, is what gives rubies their red colour, and the metal its brush with glamour, high octane cocktail parties, and the odd coronation. 

Depending on the amount of chromium, the ruby shows every possible shade of red – but the pure, unmistakably fiery red reds are the ones most cherished. Whilst the best of Sri Lanka’s rubies show off just these qualities, they often also come in a varieties of pink, red with a dash of purple, a colour variant uniquely caused by the additional presence of iron. 

The ruby King Solomon gave to the Queen of Sheba is said to have come from Sri Lanka. The island’s rubies, Marco Polo was later to record in 1292 are “the size of a man’s arm”. Their unapologetic flashiness has long made them a favourite jewel for armour, crowns, scabbards, and religious statues– as well as neckl...

Nearly seven million monkeys leap about Sri Lanka’s trees, the vast majority of them Toque Macaques. To these can be added a handful of lorises, their ancient and more wet-nosed primate relatives. These much overlooked mammals of beguiling rarity and beauty, have talent for invisibility that outsteps even that of Tolkien’s Frodo when wearing The Ring, their visibility not aided by the serious existential threat they face, with numbers of the combined loris species barely rising much about 100,000.

With over a third of the country still covered by some form of forest and over 800 trees and shrubs to choose from, the island is a tree hugger’s Shangri-la; and on first sight it would seem quite logical to assume that Sri Lanka was overrun with monkeys of many species. But in fact, the reverse is true. Quality trumps quantity. Just three variants are found on the island - The Hanuman Langur; The Purple-Faced Langur; and The Toque Macaque.

The Hanuman Langur

The Hanuman langur, also called the Tufted Gray langur - is one of three Semnopithecus priam variants, all of which are found in India;  but only Semnopithecus priam thersites lives in Sri Lanka.

Various theories – conflicting, convoluted and largely unprovable – have been put forward to account for why the Sri Lankan sub species, thersites, is different to those found in India, though the differences would tax the deductive powers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even so, patriotic toxicologists are pressing the case for the Sri Lankan variant to be declared a separate endemic species in its own right.

As the debate on this rumbles on, the langur in question gets on with its life blamelessly – and relatively unthreatened by the millstones of modern life. It was named rather eccentrically for Thersites, a bow-legged antihero from Homer’s  Trojan Wars, who was later promoted by Plato as a man best fit for the afterlife. This was a doubtful honour to bestow one of Sri Lanka’s elite mammals. 

Up to sixty inches long head to tail with a weight that can hit close to fifteen kilos, its black face is framed in a wispy white beard that runs from forehead to chin. It is a light grey in colour, and lives as readily in dry forests as urban areas – showing a strong preference for antique cultural sites if their dwellings in such places as Polonnaruwa, Dambulla, Anuradhapura, and Sigiriya are anything to go by. Once settled, they tend to stay put, having little of the gypsy tendency within them. Eagerly vegetarian, they live in troops of up to 50 members, the larger ones being curiously non-sexist - with leadership shared between a male-female pair.

Langur monkeys comes with all the complexities of a relatively capacious family – and they live in groups within which strict social hierarchies are observed. Quite how many species belong to the Langur family is a modestly debated subject amongst mammalian taxonomists, but at the last count there were eight. Or seven, depending, stretching from the Himalayas to Sri Lanka.

The Purple-Faced Langur

The Hanuman langur shares the closest of all possible evolutionary relationships with the island’s second monkey species, the purple-faced langur – so much so in fact that they have even been known to mate. This is the rarer of the island’s two langur species, its endemic status free of any debate or argument.

It lives largely in dense forest but is now threatened by habitat loss that has noticeably eroded its numbers. Vegetarian, with a tendency to opt for leaves ahead of other foods, it is shy and slightly smaller than Hanuman langur but easy to tell apart for its darker colouring, the black brown fur of its body contrasting with the mop of wispy white fur that surrounds its face and sit atop its head.

Despite, or perhaps because of being one step away from being critically endangered, the purple-faced langur has settled into its different island environments like a hand in a glove and evolved into a variety of sub species.

The Southern lowland wet zone purple-faced langur stands out for its more varied markings – a black upper torso and lavish white whiskers. Occasionally all-white versions are spotted.

The Western purple-faced langur - also confusingly named the north lowland wet zone purple-faced langur is the smallest of the lot, its fur a dark greyish brown.

The Dryzone purple-faced langur is, in contrast, the biggest version - with arresting white cheeks and an exceptionally long tail.

The Montane purple-faced langur, sometimes called the  Bear Monkey comes with extra shaggy fur, all the better to keep it warm on the higher mountains on which it prefers to live.

Excited taxologists from Jaffna have also called for the recognition of a firth sub species  - vetulus harti. Although there are no reliable recorded sightings of it as a living mammal, its pelts have been found around Jaffna and Vavuniya – strikingly yellow gold.

The Toque Macaque 

The island’s third monkey species – the Toque Macaques is to be found almost everywhere, living its best life, undeterred by much of what growing urbanization can throw at it. Their appearance is one of the most remarkable things about them. With white undersides, golden brown fur on their backs and a car crash of an almost orange coiffure, they look as if they have got lost in a cheap tanning salon or a Trump rally. Pink faces peer out below recherché hairstyles, giving substance to their name - “toque,” the brimless cap that is their bob.

They can weigh up to twelve pounds with a head to tail length of almost a metre. Whilst they have been known to live for thirty five years, most die within five, victims to infant mortality or fights within troops for dominance. 

They are accomplished scavengers, their vegetarian fancies best saited on fruit. Their capacious cheek pouches are specially adapted to allow them to store food for consuming later, a technical refinement that helps them steal, store, and run with their pilfered bounty. 

As dexterous leaping through trees as capering across the ground, or even swimming, they move in self-protective groups and sleep huddled together, every night in a different place like chastened celebrities or terrorists. 

They are easy to spot for they are active during daylight hours, appearing in groups of 20 members led by an alpha male, with half the group comprised of infants or juveniles. Young adult males wisely leave the group on attaining maturity, for fear or otherwise being chased out. But they also have a reputation for being very matey with other species – the family dog, for example. And they talk to one another. Naturalists have recorded over thirty different sounds, each conveying a very specific meaning.

Common though they are, it has not prevented them from evolving into three separate endemic variants, their differences indistinct to all but mothers and fond scientists best able to decipher the marginal differences presented in the patterns and colours on their heads.

The Pale-Fronted or Dusky Toque Macaque sticks to the wet zones in the southwest. The Common Toque Macaque favour the dry zone areas of the north and east. The Highland Toque Macaque favours the hilly centre of the island.

The Loris

&...

Looking at animals from a purely Kandyan perspective, in the beginning were not early life form sponges, or even aardvarks – but mongooses.

For it was, according to the best of legends, mongooses who were responsible for Kandy being built where it was. The city’s earliest history is an impossible mosaic of hearsay, myth, the odd inscription, and later recollections. First founded as an offshoot of the Kurunegala kingdom sometime after 1357, it lapsed into impenetrable obscurity until Vikramabāhu, a rebellious cousin of the Kotte kings remade it as his petite capital. But by the time his grandson, Karalliyadde Banḍāra, came to take over in 1551, the wafer-thin royal line had  all but petered out in a poorly judged wave of conversions to Catholicism and acquiescence to the invading Portuguese. It took the rise of a patriotic nobleman noted his machoness, Vimaladharmasuriya, to relaunch the kingdom in 1592 with sufficient vigour as to ensure it lasted as an independent state for 223 years.

The king, casting around for the best spot on which to rebuild his capital, has his attention down to the threshing ground that overlooked a large paddy field – now the Sea of Milk or Kandy Lake. The threshing ground, his astrologers advised him, was lucky. Safe even - for it was frequented by a white mongoose, a beast that, as everyone knew, was more effective in keeping a house free rats, mice, snakes, and scorpions than any cat.

And so, all around what is today known as  the Maha Maluva, the city grew, as serpentine in shape and arrangement as any of the snakes hunted by the king’s favoured mongooses.

In fact, the particular mongoose the king was drawn to was more grey than white – being the Common Ceylon Grey Mongoose, or, given its non-endemic stratus, the Indian Grey Mongoose, as it is also known. It is the smallest of the 7 mongoose species or subspecies found on the island. The creature was, wrote Rynard Kipling in 1894, “rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink; he could scratch himself anywhere he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle-brush, and his war-cry, as he scuttled through the long grass, was: 'Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”.

Kipling’s famous mongoose demonstrated all the attributes of a perfect mongoose. For despite being somewhat shy around people it is fearless with snakes, its kill strategy focused on tiring the snake by tempting it to make bites it easily avoids. Its thick grizzled iron-grey fur and neuro transmitting receptors leave it immune to snake venom; and for anyone living up-country in Sri Lanka, it is a fine companion to have around. 

Herpestes Edwardsii, as the beast is known more formally, is little more than 32 inches nose to tail it lives right across the island, often in pairs, eating fruit, roots, and small animals. It lives for around seven years, breading twice yearly and producing up to four cubs, who pop out of eggs, like all mongoose babies. Its fur, stiffer than that of other mongooses, is more interesting than the word grey implies as each individual hair is ringed  with creamy white and black markings that make even stationary beasts look as if they are running with blurred go-faster stripes streaking their whole body all the way down to a long bouffant tail.

There are in fact 5 sub species of grey mongoose living in India and other parts of South Asia; and whilst Herpestes Edwardsii is the one most seen in Sri Lanka, a second variant, Urva Edwardsii Lanka, has been identified as sufficiently different as to merit its classification as a subspecies unique to the island. Whilst its more Indian cousin lives almost anywhere, the Sri Lankan variant has a marked preference for habitats of 2000 meters or more, and avoids built up areas in favour of jungle, shrublands and riverbanks. For a time it also excited scientist for its superior olfactory capabilities – even to the extent of finding itself being trialled to detect narcotic drugs in police raids.

Telling the two apart by looks however is a challenge even committed mongoose scientists baulk at. So imagine their consternation at having to tell apart the three variants of the Brown Mongoose, two of whom are only to be found on the island. Like Goldilocks with the Three Bears, they have their work cut out. At around 30 to 34 inches nose to tail, the Ceylon Brown Mongoose (Herpestes Fuscus Maccarthiae), the only one common to both Sri Lanka and India, is marginally larger than either the Highland Ceylon Brown Mongoose (Herpestes Fuscus Flavidents), or the Western Ceylon Brown Mongoose (Herpestes Fuscus Rubidior). But there the more apparent differences end. All three species have dark brown fur, black legs, and long black enviably tufted tails. All three are sights of simple, breathtaking beauty. But seeing them is something a challenge for they are introverted beasts, with a marked preference for deeper cover, dark forests; and, like Greta Garbo, a preference for being left alone.

Identification is much easier in the case of the island’s next mongoose, the Ceylon Ruddy Mongoose (Herpestes Smithi Zeylanicus). Its grey brown fur is decidedly reddish in tone and comes with a tail that curves sharply upwards at its tasselled tip where the fur turns to a deep and even brown. Like all mongoose of any variety it feeds day and night on anything smaller than moves – and often on larger creatures too – like land monitors. Its closest relative is found in India, Herpestes Smithii Smithii , named for the Victorian zoologist, John Gray in 1837, with the Sri Lankan variant only being separated out in 1852 by another zoologist, Oldfield Thomas.

Although happily widespread, it is pathologically shy, hiding out in forest and paddy and under normal circumstances has a rather short life. That said, although it rarely lives more than seven or eight years, a Mr W. W. Phillips from Namunukula in Sri Lanka wrote to inform the Bombay Natural History Society (in those halcyon, fallible days when science was a passion shared equally with amateurs) that “the mongoose in question died on the September 8, 1955, aged approximately 17 years and it months. It ate quite well right up to the last day and died peacefully during the night, apparently of old age and /or heart failure.” 

The last of the island’s mongoose , the Striped necked Mongoose, is the Versace of the mongoose world, for it has been given an outfit by its Maker that marks it out as one of the island’s most striking and fetching mammals. A dark grey head morphs to reddish brown and grey on its neck- before blooming into a heady grizzled covering of bouffant fur that gets redder and longer the further down the body it goes. A pink nose, black legs and a reddish tail that ends in a curved tuft of black hair make up the rest of this most alluring of beasts. Widespread across Sri Lanka and southern India, it has sturdy frame and often measuring over 35 inches nose to tail – is the largest mongoose on the island. Its proclivity for calling forests its home can make sighting it a challenge, but it is a sight well worth the effort.

Although all mongooses are famous for their snake killing instincts, they have a curiously moral side too, endearing magnetic in a world besotted by luxury. In amongst the byzantine reaches of tantric Buddhism, one particular semi deified Buddhist luminary, Ratnasam bhava, is to be seen holding – or perhaps squeezing a mongoose. The animal is preoccupied vomiting up jewels of every kind, ...

Deer abound across Sri Lanka, some like the Ceylon Spotted Deer increasingly vulnerable, prey to poachers and habitat loss; others – like the Barking Deer – flourishing and presenting little concern to the scientists who maintain the Red List of Threatened Species. Two species are considered endemic to the island – the Ceylon Spotted Deer, the Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain, with Sri Lankan Sambar Deer the subject of mild debate among patriotic environmentalists trying to assess if it is so significantly more evolved as to present nature with what amounts to a new sub species unique to the island. The remaining species found in Sri Lanka are also found across South and Southeast India – the Hog Deer, and the Barkling Deer. Joining these quadrupeds are an extraordinary herd of feral ponies, abandoned by departing colonists; and a pack of wild donkeys, descendants of beasts brought to the island by ancient traders.

Troubled by the sheer lack of scientific information about the behaviour of the Ceylon Spotted Deer, the Department of Zoology, at Sri Lanka’s Eastern University, conducted a detailed study of a particular population in Trincomalee. After months of observation, they concluded, reassuringly, that “their main activities were feeding and play.” Scientists are much divided on the subject of animal play, and tortured monographs have been written attempting to pin down the very concept of animal play. To some it is merely an evolutionary by product; others claim it ensures animals teach one another about fairness and consequences. That the Sri Lankan Axis Deer should be minded to play at all is encouraging for it an increasing vulnerable species, its preferred habitats - lowland forests, and shrub lands –shrinking, and with it the grasses, leaves, and fruit it lives on. Their numbers are now counted in just several thousands. They live in herds of up to one hundred, and are seen by leopards, bears, crocodile, jackals, and hungry villagers, as living supermarkets of fresh meat. Standing up to a hundred centimetres high, their delicately white spotted fawn coats present them as everything a perfect deer ought to be, as is appropriate for an animal that is part of the island’s select few endemic mammals.

The Mouse Deer Or Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain has evolved so dramatically as a species as to present scientists with the opportunity to award it full endemic status as the Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain.  Barely twelve inches high, it lives scattered in the forests of South & Southeast Asia. The Sri Lankan variant sticks mostly to the dry zones especially Wilpattu, Udawalawa, and Sigiriya. It is tiny, gorgeous, even-toed and, unless you are a plant, entirely harmless– although popular superstition adds the caveat that a man who gets scratched by the hind foot of one will develop leprosy. This has yet to be verified by scientists. 

Tiny too is the Hog Deer – barely seventy centimetres tall.  It has short legs, a predilection to whistle, fine antlers and dark brown fur.  It actually looks nothing like a pig but gains that interspecies appellation for its tendency to rush through the forest, head down like one of the racing pigs at Bob Hale Racing Stables in far-off Michigan. Stretching right across the grass lands of Sri Lanka and South and Southeast Asia, it is now classified as extremely vulnerable, its small herds shrinking in the face of habitat loss.

Less threatened is The Indian Muntjak or Barking Deer.  Carefree, with a propensity to eat almost anything, the Barking Deer is a cuddly irritant in jungle and on low hill estates, its numbers flourishing across South and Southeast Asia. It grows to around sixty centimetres in height and is covered in reddish brown fur and, for males, throws in a modest set of antlers. Shy, solidity, rarely seen in numbers more than two, it gets its name for the dog-barking sound it makes when alarmed. It is a modest, if reliable breeder, with pregnancies lasting six months after which one or, occasionally, two pups are born.

But of all the island deer, the Sambar Deer claims gold as the largest and most impressive of the several deer species with which shares its genes. Within Sri Lanka, the species has evolved still further and teeters on the edge of being declared endemic – as the Sri Lankan Sambar (Rusa unicolor unicolor). Much mistaken for an elk by early British colonists eager to shoot it, it can be seen in herds in places like Horton Plains – but it is classified as extremely venerable all the same. It is a tempting target for poachers stocking up on game meat to sell, and the pressures on its grassland habitats are not getting any easier. Typically one and half metres high (sometimes more), their herds consist of females with their fawns, which they usually produce yearly. The males, like men with sheds who have taken the designation to extremes, prefer to live alone - except when the mating urge overcomes them. Fossil records from tens of thousands of years earlier, show the existence of a now extinct ancestor, the Muva Sinhaleya, a species of Sambur smaller in size than the one alive today.

Distant relations of a sort are The Ponies of Mannar.  Strung out to the west of Jaffna in the Palk Strait is the tiny coral island of Delft, bared fifty square mile and home to less than five thousand people. And five hundred wild ponies. Dotted with Baobab trees, archaeological marvels from ancient to colonial times, and abundant wildlife, Delft has become the last refuge for the Sri Lankan Wild Pony, the direct descendant of the ponies exported to the island by the Portuguese and Dutch from Europe and their colonies in the East, to provide basic transportation. Left behind at Independence, and superseded by cars and lorries, they have carved out a fringe existence on the hot dry island, fighting off as best they can dehydration and occasional starvation. The Wildlife Department has since offered them a much greater degree of protection but if there are any deep pocketed millionaires out there dissatisfied by the sight of the likely heirs, the wild ponies of Delft offer a much more attractive option for legacies and reputational garnishing.

No less threatened are Sri Lanka’s diminishing herds of feral donkeys.  Found mostly in Mannar, Talaimannar and Puttalam, they are descendants of equine immigrants that entered the great port of Maathottam near Mannar - once the shipping gateway to the ancient Anuradhapura Kingdom. Arab traders were probably most responsible for importing the beasts to carry their cargos inland. The species that lives here is said to be a direct decadent of the Nubian African Wild Ass, now extinct in its native Ethiopia and Sudan. Extinction also faces it in Sri Lanka, its habitat every diminishing; and hungry villagers occasionally helping themselves to what will become tomorrow’s stew. There are said to be under 3,000 still alive, through a wonderful charity, Bridging Lanka, has stepped in to try and nurse them back to happier times.

The last of the island’s deer-like beasts is the Gaur, or Indian Bison.  Once common throughout South and Southeast Asia, the Gaur is moving inexorably towards extinction, with a just 21,000 mature specimens still living. Related to yaks and water buffalo, they are the largest of all wild cattle and out ranked in size by other land mammals only by elephants, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus. The Ceylon Gaur (Bibos Sinhaleyus Deraniyagala) is a distinct sub species that used to be found in Sri Lanka but was last spotted by British adventurers in 1681 in the menagerie of King Rajasinghe II of Kandy – though the Sri Lakan government recently proposed to its Indian counterpart that they send half a dozen gaur to the island as part of a reintroduction programme.

Counting Sri Lanka’s wild cats is no minor feat. None of them care to be counted, still less seen. Some have vanished; and at least one is the subject of such impassioned scientistic debate that its righteous credentials as distinct species or sub species still hang in the balance.

Even so, of the many mighty mammals that once sat, enthroned, like Phidias’ Olympian Zeus gazing at the lesser world around him, so too did a dazzling assembly of cats lord it over the island, at the very apex of Sri Lanka’s food chain. Some of the most glamorous members of this ancient feline club have long since vanished, predators who themselves fell prey - less to other predators but to climate change, and the accompanying alternations in vegetation. 

Others, thriving, or perhaps now just clinging on to life with grim resilience in other corners of the world, never made it to the island in the first place. This, today, is not the country where you might glimpse cougars, lynx, ocelot, or jaguars slipping stealthily through scrub forests. 

But, as benefits of one the world’s most notable biospheres, the island has instead as astonishing variety of surviving predator cats, truly the cat’s pyjamas, including one that has moulded its appearance so intimately around a particular environment that scientists have eagerly given it endemic status three times over, with a fourth, identified from a small town near Nuwara Eliya, waiting for taxological promotion like a good, albeit dead man before the Catholic Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.

Today, tourists come in teaming numbers to catch a glimpse of the Ceylon Leopard. Indeed, some are so overwrought if denied the sight they are wont to demand their money back from hapless safari operators. For the leopard, shrewd, secretive, elusive, has its own quite firm ideas about just to whom and when it might offer itself up for a selfie. 

It is without doubt the greatest endemic jewels in Sri Lanka’s mammalian crown and the largest of the country's cat species.  Unlike other leopards, notably the ones that inhabit India, it has no other rival predators, and this has inspired so great a degree of evolution that Sri Lanka’s leopards are now considered to be a separate and quite distinct sub species, only to be found on the island.

This lack of competition  has probably helped account for their size - averaging six feet in length, head to tail, and weighing anything up to two hundred and twenty pounds, making it larger than other leopard species.

Solitary and with a life expectancy of around 15 years, it is also far less agreessive than others; and quite comfortable hunting through both day and night, rather than restricting itself to the usual nocturnal habits of its Indian counterpart. It is beautifully attuned to hunting, an observer noting that “if the lion is the king of the jungle, then the leopard is the king of stealth,” able to run seventy kilometres an hour and leap as far as six metres.

Despite habitats that stretch right across the island, it has a preference for the cooler highlands – places like Horton Palins for example – and has developed thicker fur and fat layers to stay warm. This fussiness has probably told against it: actual numbers of the Sri Lankan Leopard are falling fast and are currently estimated to be around just eight hundred. Conservation methods have failed to have any meaningful impact on their population in general and there is little sense of urgency in government circles about the pressing need to do more to protect the future of this apex predator. Habitat loss as much a disastrous history of human-animal interaction is largely to blame for this decline but if nothing is done soon about it the Sri Lanka Tourist Board may have to turn to promoting monkeys. 

It is differentiated from other leopards too in its rosettes which are closer-set and smaller than any other species. And an errant gene in the leopard population provides the rarest of leopards, the Black Leopard, of whom there have been only a few firm sightings. One in every three hundred leopards born has the propensity to be black and so able to live up to Karl Lagerfeld’s gimlet observation: “One is never overor underdressed with a little black dress.”

Thousands of centuries ago it had a lot more competition from wild cats that were much larger and more fearsome.  And the spectral remains of three of these giants of the cat world live on in the minds of those wise enough to be ever mindful of history. Indeed, the simple process of discovering these beasts made searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack look like a walk in the park. Traces – the odd bit of tooth, or chip of bone – emerged during long hard digs by dedicated biologists in parts of the country not renowned for their embarrassment of facilities, hotels, bars or even air conditioned rooms. But the reward in finding these lost clues was immense, throwing open the country’s far distant past to a yet more diverse era where Alpha mammals came with stripes or with beards, and not just spots.

The first of these, still adoring the national flag, is the Sri Lankan lion, thought to have become extinct in 37,000 BCE – about the same time as the famous Stone Age Balangoda Man walked his last steps. Panthera Leo Sinhaleyus, as the sub species is known, only came to light in 1936 when the archaeologist, P.E.P. Deraniyagala, uncovered two fossilized teeth in Kuruwita, near Ratnapura. With the passion of an Hercule Poirot, the archaeologist studied his modest clutch of teeth. One was so damaged as to be of little use in identifying the animal, but the other, a left molar presented so distinctive a structure as to not just twin it with lions but set it apart from all known species too. 

From this single tooth, a lost sub species was uncovered, its size indicating that the beast was a lion much larger than the present Indian lion. Back in 37,000 BCE, Sri Lanka was a very different place to what it would become, an island of open grasslands a habitat perfect for lions. But over time, as the monsoon rainforest fuelled the proliferation of trees, its habitat become ever more restricted and at some point, the creature just died out. The National Flag aside, the lion lives on still in many a temple and ancient fortress, in statues and even biscuits and breweries.

A more recent albeit extinct competitor was uncovered with a set of scant but intriguing fossil records of a Tiger (Panthera Tigris). These telling fossils amount to a left lower tooth found near Ratnapura in 1962 and a sub-fossil of a paw bone dated back 16,500 years, found near Kuruwita. Tigers appear to have arrived in India some 12,000 years ago and spread from there to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. But it seems that it was not this Tiger sub species that wandered across the then existing land bridge from India to Sri Lanka – but another one altogether, one that was native to central Asia, eastern and northern China, Japan, northern Siberia, Sumatra, and Java. Little else is known of this now long departed mammal whose spectral remains sadly disproves the old German proverb “There is no off switch on a tiger.”

The last of these great competitors was the Ceylon Asiatic Cheetah. . A distinctly different version of the Africa Cheetah, the Asiatic Cheetah once roamed the world from Arabia and the Caspian to South Asia and Sri Lanka, until around ten thousand years ago. Today they are no longer found in Sri Lanka and in Asia their numbers are so few that all but the most myopically optimistic enthusiasts, anticipate th...

Europeans first encountered mermaids in Sri Lanka 500 years ago.  Just a few decades after arriving, the Portuguese, under the command of Constantino of Braganza, a cousin of the King of Portugal, tiring of the rather successful raids upon his fleet by the Kings of Jaffna, decided war was the best way forward. His expedition, in November 1560, resulted in the capture of Mannar Island.

Inevitably, many in his army were terribly injured and under the naval doctor, Dimas Bosque, a beach hospital was erected.  Bosque, described as  "a very cultured man, well known for his veracity, and quite sagacious in the treatment of illnesses,” took up the story in a letter later discovered in the Jesuit library in France.  

“One day a crowd of fishermen came to the Father, requesting him, with loud shouting in their own language, to go to their boats and look at some fishes they had caught. They said that while they were fishing, they had, by a stupendous miracle of nature, either by luck or that the marvellous works of God the Almighty might be spoken of, caught in their nets nine female fishes and seven males, which, because of their resemblance to human beings, the natives themselves called "sea men" and "sea women". "Struck by the novelty, as was natural, we went to the boats. The fishermen who had remained there had already taken the fish out of the boats and laid them on the shore. When I saw them and contemplated how greatly they resembled human beings, I could scarcely breathe. In wonderment I could hardly turn my eyes away from their admirable bodies. What I saw then with my own eyes I would never have believed if someone else had told me. I kept staring at these fish with their marvellous resemblance to human beings. Such a work of nature seemed hardly believable even while I was looking at it with my own eyes. Nevertheless, helped by Christiah philosophy, I referred the extraordinary shape of the fish before me to God the maker of all things, to whom nothing is difficult to make, let alone impossible. I considered it worthwhile to inspect and consider each particular member, so that in this way, after exactly examining the anatomy of each part, I would clearly understand the similitude of the whole body with that of a human being. Externally the resemblance was very great.”

What Bosque had actually discovered as not mermaids by dugongs.  He was by no means the first to confuse the two. Christopher Colombus himself had come across them a few years earlier, noting in his diary - “the day before, when the Admiral was going to the Rio del Oro, he said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water but were not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men.”

Hundreds of years of brutal hunting have since driven this most marvellous of all the island’s sea mammals to the brink of extinction.  But a gentler creature would be hard to find.

Growing to around eleven feet in length, with poor eyesight but a good sense of smell, they propel themselves forward by flippers and tail, and although they can live to up to seventy years, longevity is now a but a dugong dream.  Widespread legal protection has not stopped them being hunted, whilst habitat pollution and degradation has also decimated their numbers. In Sri Lanka, their meat was highly sought and considered to have medicinal and aphrodisiac properties; and diaries note that as recently as the 1950s over one hundred and fifty slaughtered animals were offered for sale annually in Mannar alone. Their cautious reproductive habits do not much help them either, with males taking sometimes as many as eighteen years to reach sexual maturity. The impressive Dugong and Seagrass Conservation Project reports depressingly that “large herds of dugongs were reported to have occurred in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka in the early 1900s; however, none were sighted during aerial surveys conducted of Palk Bay and the waters off western Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and their current status and distribution are unknown.” Even so, they have been uncorroborated reports of more recent sightings including one in 2017 in Puttalam Lagoon where some say they still live, grazing on sea grass meadows in shallow bays, and mangroves.

But out beyond these sheltered shores, in deeper waters, Sri Lanka’s other sea mammals are faring better, and the country is one of the best places in Asias to sort them – especially in Mirissa it is November to April; off Trincomalee in May to September; or Kalpitiya from December to March.

Three capacious seas splash against Sri Lanka’s beaches – from the east, the Bay of Bengal; from the west the Laccadive Sea; and from the south the Indian Ocean. Purists clamour for a fourth – the shallow Palk Straights that link the north of the island to the south of India. Either way, the country is blessed by being so central to a great mix of oceans. Like a roundabout amidst a myriad of roads, its shores are a nursery, school, home, and larder for a plenitude of marine creatures, not least its mammals. Whale watching, with abundant side helpings of dolphin and the odd bit of porpoise watching, are propelling a whole new branch of environmental tourism.

Scientists estimate that across the ninety species of whales found today, there are some 1.5 million creatures, many centred around specific oceans. Sri Lanka boasts an impressive 12 of these massive saline residents including that most magnificent of whales – the Blue Whale, one of country’s 2 most commonly encountered sea beasts 

Measuring up to one hundred feet, there is nothing that still lives on our harried planet quite so large or inspiring as the Blue Whale. From Moby-Dick, and the prophet Jonah, to Aristotle and Kipling, they have become creatures whose literary heritage is almost as impressive as their mythological one. They sing, live blamelessly on krill, and press on through the ups and downs of life for up to ninety years. The males sport a 3 metre penis, the largest of any species still alive. They are truly one of our planet’s greatest wonders, yet have been hunted to near extension, their numbers falling from around 140,000 in 1926 to some 25,000 in 2018. Today they also face serious threats from collisions with ships, and rising noise pollution. They take about ten years to reach sexual maturity and produce calves every two to three years – a low, slow reproductive process that puts further strain on their global numbers. They only area of the world they seem to avoid is the Arctic. Remarkably, the blue whales found off Sri Lanka’s beaches are permanent residents, their otherwise migratory inclinations negated by the sheer magnetic nutrient wealth of the country’s waters, fed by run off and monsoon rain and captured by an ocean shelf that is perfectly constituted to maximise the availability and accessibility of food.

The Sperm Or Cachalot Whale is the other whale often seen here.  Massive, migratory, equipped with the largest brain of any living creature, and able to live up to seventy years, the Sperm Whale is everything that a well bread species of whale aims to be. It abounds in superlatives: a four chambered stomach, the longest intestinal system of any creature in the world; capable of emitting a sound louder than any other living beast, and happiest swimming in ice-free waters over 1,000 metres deep. Hunted by commercial whalers for hundreds of years, their numbers were pushed to the point of extreme vulnerability but have since started to recover – slowly. They are one of the most sighted whales off Sri Lanka’ shores, tempted by warms and plentiful seas to group together and mate,...

Einstein – or perhaps it was Sun Tzu – argued that subtle is as subtle does.  If they are correct then the very existence of this podcast threatens the salient virtue of Sri Lanka’s most elusive animals with a terrible undoing.  But it’s a risk worth taking.

Big, bold, and marvellous though so much of what is immediately encountered in Sri Lanka, more marvellous even that all you might ever encounter here, is everything that at first sight looks most ordinary. 

Running alongside its elephants (the biggest in Aisa); its literature (Booker-winning); its literary (stratospheric); its politicians (megaphone-loving); its recorded history (2,500 years and counting); its leopards (larger than most); its spices (flawless), is a rare penchant for subtlety, the one virtue that – of course - dare not speak its name. 

Such reticence is remarkable. Alarming, pleasing, it is also, as the Apostle Paul might have said, something that "passeth all understanding, an innate national delicacy wrenched from centuries of struggle, sympathy, fatalism – and plenty.

Wherever you look you are likely to find a trove of detectably undetectable meanings which, however good or grim, are always so engrossing as to ensure that you need never run the risk of living a life so unexamined as to be barely worth living at all.

And so it is with skinks. They are the most model of model metaphors for the country; symbols for a nuanced elusiveness that is much more inspiring than anything instantly evident. So small as to be ignored; so little studied as to be mysterious; so numerous as to be everywhere, they live a life somewhere between heaven and hell, like semi-fallen angels, prefect for always being not what they seem. If that is, they are ever noticed at all. For Sri Lanka’s skinks have a degree of subtleness that propels that immaterial attribute into the outer galaxy.

Like the Mermaid in far off Zennor, the island’s skinks live in plain sight, far beneath the radar. Never has there been a more perfect creature to win lasting acclaim as the country’s national animal as this -  though the awarding of such an honour would of course destroy the very reason why skinks should be chosen to win it at all.

Despite owning to 1700 different species around the world, skinks are almost as obscure as sea potatoes. More snake-like than lizards, but with legs that no snake owns, with the face of tiny dragons, the agility of squirrels, and the impish intelligence of chameleons, they live all around us, minuscule glittering version of Rudolph Vanentino: sleek, elegant, nimble, and stylish. They can be seen in trees, rocks, grassland, buildings, jungle, scrub, coast. The very antithesis of McDonald’s and every other soulless global brand, of the 31 skinks that call Sri Lanka home a colossal 85% are to be seen nowhere else but here. 

But a word of warning – for the claim that the island is home to 31 different skink species is to court controversy. Modern science has done its level best to make skink counting almost impossible, given the proclivity scientists have for reclassifying anything that ever once moved. Many claim that there are 34 skinks here; others far less. It all depends on which monograph or piece of field research can be said to have preceded all others. To make skink appreciation still more impenetrable, scientists have given these petite beasts the most wearisome of Latin names. It is as if some gargantuan global conspiracy born in the Ark itself has plotted to keep skinks out of sight and out of mind. This modest study of island skinks, elaborated here, seeks to repair some of the damage.

Certainly, some skinks do their uttermost best to present a rather grungy face to the world, eager to extend and protect their social isolation. The Toeless Snake Skink is a great example of this. Despite being well distributed across Sri Lanka, especially in the high forested parts of Kandy, its rather drab black-bronze countenance and complete absence of legs, ensures that is forever overlooked. Taylor's Lanka Skink is no better. Tiny – 43 mm in length  and little more – endemic and commonplace in such areas as Sinharaja,  the Knuckles, Gampola, and Hantana, it is dull bronze with the merest hint of a 5 o’clock shadow down the length of its body. It was named in for an obscure Missouri zoologist, Edward Taylor, an honour it shares with nine other reptiles, eleven reptile sub species, eight amphibians and a milk snake once rumoured to suck cow’s udders.

Other island skinks though are more evidently in the catwalk category. The Common Dotted Garden Skink, happily, widespread right accords Sri Lanka and the Indian sub-continent - even into Vietnam, proves that being common is no deterrent to being quite simply stunning. With its carrot-coloured trail and golden bronze body it looks as if it has strolled out from the showrooms of Cartier, or Bulgari. Certainly, any celebrity empathic enough to adopt one as a pet would have little compunction in not also taking it as a Plus-One to one of the better launch parties to which they are invited. Its striking appearance makes it relatively easy to spot, as does its uncommon size – varying from a tiny 34mm to a titanic 148mm.

Beddome's Skink is another knockout. One of the nicer, albeit unintended, consequences of Richard Beddome setting off for Madras in 1848 to join the East India Company, was his discovery of many new species. He was  to give his name to a  bat, three lizards, a gecko, two skink, five snakes, a toad, four frogs, five plants, two slugs and a blind worm before retiring to Wandsworth over forty years after he had first made his dreamy adolescent way out east. His collections can still be seen in museums in London, Calcutta  and Scotland, the legacy of an admirable naturalist hiding under the cover of an army officer. One of his skinks, Beddome's Skink, is still most easily to be found right across India and Sri Lanka, a modest 55mm in size and joyfully untroubled by the excesses of the modern world. It has four legs and four toes attached to each one. With the Breton stripe French naval uniform popularized by Coco Chanel as its distinctive markings, it is placed well into the high fashion end of skinkdom.

And here it can keep company with Dussumier's Litter Skink. Named for a 19th century French zoologist, better known for his work on herrings, Jean-Jacques Dussumier’s skink, sometimes called the Litter Skink is found not just in Sri Lanka but across southern India too where it lives in most forests habitats below 500 metres. Somewhat solitary and unapologetically territorial, it is a thriving beast of no real conservation concern. About 50mm in length it comes  with the most fashionable of appearances. A tapering dark black stipe edges the sides of its body which is otherwise a speckled bronze; and its tails fade from this into a brilliant tangerine.

Another proven pin-up is Haly's Tree Skink. First discovered in Sri Lanka back in 1887 by an intrepid zoological double act, Haly & Nevill, Haly's Tree Skink later became embroiled in impassioned taxological arguments ignited by sightings of what was through to be endemic to the island, but in various parts of India. For decades, the argument went first one way, then the other: it was endemic. No, it wasn’t. Currently, the consensus seems to be that it is – the Sri Lankan variant being sufficiently different to its Indian cousin as to be considered a separate species. But the debate, rather like a grumpy politician in opposition, is bound to explode again, fed by thirsty new findings. Bearing four feet and four toes on each limb, at a colossal 80mm, it hovers on the edge of conservation misery, being in the Near Threatened category. But it bears such striking horizontal dark brown stripes across its golden bronze back as to have won i...

This podcasts is a search for Sri Lanka’s notorious Devil Bird, encountering on the way, all 12 of its distinguished owls.

Once upon a time, uncountable centuries ago, a woman sat done to enjoy a curry supper with her husband. With hindsight, she ought to have been more alert: after all, her husband making dinner was no usual thing. But then, nor was the curry, for nestling amongst the spices and vegetables she discovered a tiny finger. All that was left of her infant son.

Suspicion, jealousy, alcohol and an excess of testosterone were just some of the other apparent ingredients found in that fateful dinner. A husband deeply suspicious of his wife’s fidelity; his acid distrust of his young’s son’s real paternity – it all came together in a grisly act of filicide. Murdering his uncertain heir, the man cooked and served up his tiny body to his wife.

Although murdering one’s child is relatively common (in America, for example, there are some 2000 cases per year), combining the appalling deed with fine dining is so rare as to be almost unparalleled. Yet this, according to one of the most dogged folk myths of Sri Lanka, is exactly what occurred in that jungle one terrible night.

Unhinged by grief, the mother fled screaming into the forest, where the gods, exhibiting that kind of double edged kindness that all ancient gods seem to excel at. They turned her into a bird – the ulama, or devil bird, or to be still more exact, what is thought to be the Sri Lankan Spot-bellied Eagle Owl.

In his book “Seeing Ceylon,” published in 1965, the remarkable Renaissance Burger, R. L. Brohier, surveyor, historian and the driving force behind the Gal Oya Reservoir, the island’s largest water tank, famously described the “clucking strangling sobs” the bird makes - “a scream which froze the blood”, “a series of dreadful shrieks as if coming from a soul in great agony of torment.”

For so ghoulish and intemperate a description, this one has the rare advantage of being accurate. The owl’s call really does sound as if a small infant is being murdered; or his mother is wailing with unconsolable wretchedness. Long after the owl has flown away, the sound stays with you, not unlike a spicy meal itself or as if Beethoven’s Fifth had become entangled with Heavy Metal. Once heard, never forgotten. 

The owl itself is huge – the sixth largest in the world, with a wingspan approaching six feet. Despite this, it is rarely seen – being not only almost wholly nocturnal but also sticking to the most impenetrable parts of large forests. Spotted in such places as Yala, Wilpattu, and Sinharaja, it has also been seen and – of course – heard in Kurunegala, Kandy – and Galagedera, with one dropping in with alarming mateyness several nights a year at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.

Its visual coyness it a great pity for the bird is something of a looker, resembling a ghostly and very aristocratic dowager, given to looking at the world with quizzical mistrust, its ashy white feathers picked out with dark highlights like the ermine Robe of State worn by British monarchs at their coronation. Where it betters any monarch is in its gorgeous horizontal ear tufts – which can be around 3 inches in length, making the bird’s head appear as it has a pair of assistant wings of its own, a living, breathing Douglas DC-4.

Zealous vegetarians they are not, their diet consisting of meat, more meat, and then still more, in all shapes and sizes – from tiny cowering rodents to recorded feasts involving civets, jackets, deer, and even monkeys. They pass their carnivorous inclinations onto their young from the start, raising them on meat before taking them off for short hunting trips to learn the juicy arts of entrapment.

Thankfully, civilization’s perpetual intrusions have had little impact on their status, and they are widely recorded by numerate ornithologists – this despite the fact that mating pairs tend to lay but a single egg a year. Sri Lanka marks the southernmost limit of their territory, which extends north to the Himalayas and east to Vietnam, making them, if not endemic to the island, then at least fully paid up residents. Even so, they stand as something of a standard-bearer for the island’s owls in general, not just for their audacious glamour and history – but also that something quite so vast should live with such surreptitious ease in the modern world. 

In this they are not alone. 

Almost 500 bird species have been recorded on the island – although arguments rage over quite how many are endemic to Sri Lanka. Experts argue that only somewhere between 34 and 23 are truly endemic – a mere 5 or 6 per cent of the avian population. 

To put this in context, the authoritative International Ornithologists' Union classes 255 birds worldwide as owls of one kind or another. Looked at from this perspective Sri Lanka is something of a high achiever - a country that has 0.01% of the world’s land mass hosts 0.8% of its endemic owl species. Altogether, the island is home to 12 owl species, nine of these resident in other Asian countries, most particularly around the Indian sub-continent; and one a tourist.

Of these nine, the Brown Wood Owl most resembles its ulama peer, being almost as large and with a cry that – if not murderous – is loud and distinctive, somewhere between a bark and a scream, the exact sound being subtly different according to their passing nationality. Found in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Taiwan, and south China as well as Sri Lanka, their call varies from being soft and low in India to being decidedly more forceful in Indonesia. Like the Devil Bird, it seems untroubled by the bellicose excesses of human impositions, being categorised as a species under no great existential threat – though it likes to hide in deep forest, making its public appearances at night. Its plumage, brown on top but wavey brown-white streaks on its belly, is no less lovely for coming from the Marks and Spencer’s end of feather fashion.

Just as brown as the Brown Wood Owl is the Brown Fish Owl, a species common throughout south and southeast Asia but which has inspired a healthy range of sub variants, the Sri Lankan version of which teeters on the giddy and celebrated edge of endemic ness. It is smaller and darker than its other fish owl cousins, about two feet in length and with an unremarkable white-brown plumage, not unlike a much loved duffle coat. Its fondness for fish means it is most easily spotted around coastlines, lakes, and rivers, but it is also regularly reported to being seen in the deeper jungle too. It found its circuitous way into western taxology from a drawing made by a Dutch colonist on the island, the drawing being included in 1776 in an illustrated zoology book created by Peter Brown, a London based Danish conchologist and friend of Captain Cook’s great botanist, Joseph Banks. The picture’s inclusion in a book published by a professor in Göttingen some decades later pushed the little owl into the European mainstream, where it was seized on by Linnaeus himself for inclusion in his groundbreaking “Systema Naturae,” the birthplace of modern scientific classicisation systems.

Like the Brown Fish Owl, the Sri Lanka bay owl is another owl that teeters on the festive cusp of endemic ness. There are only two variants of this species recognised globally, one from India’s Western Ghats, the other from Sri Lanka. Whilst scientists continue to argue about whether or not the Sri Lankan variant should be promoted into a recognized and distinctive separate speci...

Beneath the glamours quills of cinnamon or vines of pepper, Sri Lanka’s two most dazzling indigenous spices, hide a clutch of others – the secret spices whose clandestine contribution to food and medicine is the subject of this podcast.

Many of Sri Lanka’s indigenous spices are barely known outside the island; indeed, so far as Tesco, Walmart or Carrefour go, they remain inscrutable, ingredients of electrifying mystery. But collectively, they may well have been what Virginia Woolf had in mind when as she sat for dinner with her husband, Leonard, the assistant government agent for the District of Hambantota - “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."  For Sri Lanka’s lesser known indigenous spices cast a distinctively captivating taste across its dishes. 

The first of these reticent herbals is moringa, a short lived, fast growing, ten metre high tree, indigenous to India and Sri Lanka. It matures with good tempered ease, demanding merely tropical temperatures, water, and good drainage. Barely known outside Asia and Africa, it is a spice to covet. Every part of the plant is edible. Its leaves can be used in salads or boiled like spinach. Its flowers make a great tea and its seed pods, when young, present themselves as a rare alternative to asparagus. Its taste is grassy, a little bitter with an agreeable horseradish-like heat and flavour which explains why it is also known as the horseradish tree. According to several authoritative scientific studies of the plant, it is ridiculously healthy as well. Its dried leaves offer seven times the Vitamin C of oranges, nine times more protein than yoghurt, ten times more Vitamin A than carrots, and fifteen times the potassium of bananas. 

It is widely used in Indian Ayurvedic medicine to mitigate heart disease and as anti-inflammatory, anti-cholesterol, antidepressant, and antioxidant. It may also help you see better and grow more luxuriant hair. The ancient Greeks used it in perfume. The Egyptian pharaohs depended on it for their complex death rituals. Warriors consumed it before battle. And with far less drama, it is widely used in Sri Lankan cooking and in many of the rice and curries made here on The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It is favourite addition to all things fish; and its stars with the greatest lustre in the island’s celebrated Spicy Drumstick Curry dish. 

But if it’s a touch of fusion food you are really after, go down the moringa-as-asparagus route. Collect young tender pods around a foot in length before they become too woody. Trim them in smaller asparagus like-lengths, add onion, butter, and salt, and boil them for ten minutes. Then steam the pods in a marinade of oil, vinegar, sea salt, pepper, garlic, and parsley and enjoy them with all the sophisticated delight that made Louis XIV’s obsessive consumption of asparagus so memorable as to figure in every contemporary Versailles diary. 

Another of the island’s lesser known spices is brindleberry – known here as Goraka, or to give it its full and formal Latin honorific, Garcinia gummi-gutta. It is the Lewis Carroll of the spice world for the White Rabbit must have had its mercilessly caustic taste in mind as he wandered through Wonderland: “The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, All on a summer day: The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, And took them quite away!” It is a slow growing rainforest tree that reaches about twenty meters in height with dark shiny leaves and rough black bark. It is an unfussy plant, growing happily so long as it has its roots in deep, well drained, slightly acidic, light clay soil. In Ayurvedic medicine it is used to treat ulcers, and digestive problems. Western medicine is now busy studying its hydroxycitric acid content to better design medicines that increase fat burning whilst simultaneously reducing fat accumulation and appetite. Some scientists also believe it can be of use in managing cholesterol, stabilizing sugar levels, and protecting the body from cell damage.

Goraka fruit, which resembles doll’s house-sized pumpkins, are first dried before its flesh is used in place of lime or tamarind to give dishes, especially fish dishes, a distinctly tart taste. The fruit badly needs this pre preparation as it is otherwise far too acidic to be eaten raw. Its most famous island offering is in Ambulthiyal, the classic Sri Lankan sour fish curry where, as part of a mix of spices, it turns the fish meat as stylish black as the walls of a Soho literary cocktail bar. 

Gotu Kola is another of the island’s demure indigenous spcies, something of a Mother Theresa amongst spices, awash with virtue and value. Known as pennywort or centella asiatica, it is a herby perennial vegetable, with small round leaves that bud off soft stems like a kind, apple-green version of watercress. It thrives in rich, moist soil, with plenty of shade and manure – the swampy edges of ponds are an especial favourite. The leaf has a subtle earthy taste, sweet and bitter at the same time and combines especially well with coconut. It is popular in traditional medicine where it is considered to promote life expectancy and good vision. Modern science is catching up on the beneficial effects of its principal compounds – especially triterpenoid saponin, a naturally occurring sugar. Studies suggest this has many applications: as antiviral to inhibit the replication of viruses like herpes; as an antioxidant; an anti-neoplastic to combat cancers; and to promote collagen production. Other studies are in progress to identify how it helps improve memory, and support blood circulation.

In Europe Gotu Kola has yet to make the leap from specialist natural food shop to supermarket but here in Sri Lanka almost any vegetable shop has it for sale. It stars in many island dishes, but the two most famous ones are as a sambal – a salad where it is combined with coconut, onions, lime, tomatoes, and pepper; and as a porridge. Kola Kanda, or Gotu Kola Herbal Rice Porridge, to give it its full and formal name, is a comfort food that is ridiculously easy to make. Red rice and a bit of garlic are boiled up. Gotu Kola and curry leaves are blended to dust, strained, and added, with coconut milk, to the cooked rice. The gorgeous green porridge is poured into breakfast bowls, and, served with a piece of sweet jaggery – and so begins a better day. 

Curry leaves, the small pinnate leaves of the sweet neem tree is a commonplace ingredient in Sri Lanka and is no longer the Mr Quiet of the spice world, becoming ever better known outside of South and SE Asia and China. It has even made its first tentative appearance in such places as Sainsburys and Tesco. It is a very easy going plant, growing well from cuttings and root divisions and afraid of few, if any, animals. It reaches heights of around four meters quickly as long as it’s got decent sun. It puts up with all soil types as well as periods of prolonged dryness. It gives all the dishes it touches an earthy citrus-like flavour and a scent as if lemon grass and star anise had been twinned in some ecstatic horticultural coupling. It is especially delicious when fried with cashew nuts. Picked and used fresh off the tree, like basil in Italian cooking or marjoram in Greek dishes, there is almost no South Asian dish to which it cannot be added to deepen both flavour and scent. It has long been a staple ingredient Ayurvedic medicine to treat skin and hair problems and combat indigestion, bloating, and constipation. Westen science is studying its various chemical properties, especially its carbazole alkaloids, to improve cancer and anti-inflammatory therapies. 

Despite the racial slur impli...

It took just three homespun goddess - Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia - to give their ancient Mediterranean world all the perfection it needed; its charm, beauty, and creativity. And so it is with the three great indigenous spcies of Sri Lanka: cinnamon, pepper, and turmeric. Native to the island, it is impossible to image how life would be here without them.

The greatest of these is cinnamon. Its perfumed bushes mark out the outer edge of the spice garden at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. No other thing, except perhaps Buddhism itself, water or Sri Lanka’s island status has had so marked an impact on the country as this miraculous spice, beloved of Herodotus, Aristotle, Nero; and such famous chefs as Vivek Singh and Emma Bengtsson. It is the magnetic North of the world’s spices, having enticed traders, colonists and planters to Sri Lanka, the invisible force field of its glittering commercial allure sucking them in, willing monopolist marketers, villainous vendors, wolfish merchants. The consequences of their commercial obsession were to remake the island - utterly.

But that is, of course, not the fault of the plant itself, and not even that fact that it has been expropriated in name by hotels and insurance companies, wellness spas, buns, babies, and kitchen ware can deter from its epic health and culinary properties. Unlike Cinnamon aromaticum or Cinnamon cassia, which comes largely from Vietnam and Indonesia, and is commonly known as Chinese cinnamon, Ceylon Cinnamon – or to give it its Latin name, Cinnamomum verum, comes almost only from Sri Lanka. It is, in fact just one of ten species that can credibly claim to be fully indigenous to the island – the other fourteen key ones being imports of one kind or another. 

The most significant difference between the two variants of cinnamon lies in their health qualities. Of the eighty or so chemical compounds that make up both varieties of cinnamon there is little to compare in how well they are known to improve insulin, increase blood sugar uptake, reduce cholesterol and, with their shared anti-inflammatory and antioxidant qualities, act against bacteria and fungi- - even to the extent of stopping the growth of tumours. Both also work to stop the built up of tau, a substance in the brain that can lead to Alzheimer’s disease. They way in which they metabolize into sodium benzoate mitigates the loss of proteins like Parkin and DJ-1 and so inhibits the progression of Parkinson’s Disease. The polyphenols both varieties have help to detoxify enzymes to protect against the growth of cancer cells. Their shared cinnamaldehyde component activates thermogenesis, a process that results in the enhanced burning of calories. 

But where they differ is in their inclusion of coumarin, an aromatic organic compound with known hepatotoxic and carcinogenic properties; and one that is known to cause liver damage. Compared to Chinese cinnamon, Sri Lankan cinnamon has extremely low levels of this dangerous chemical - 250 times less, to be exact. It is therefore they only sure variety to use for health benefits.

Gourmands would also argue for its preference in cooking. Sri Lankan cinnamon has a flavour that is arresting different – sweeter, more subtle, and less bitter than Cinnamon cassia. It has a softer texture and a lighter colour – and, commanding a much higher price than Chinese cinnamon, accounts for just nine percent of the world’s one billion pus dollar market. As one food writer put it: “cinnamon is the flavour equivalent of being hugged by your grandmother.”

From fruit pies and custards, sweet breads and rolls, teas, soup, lattes, pilaffs, baked meats, pancakes, cakes, dumplings and pot roasts, its delicate nature allows it to compliant dishes rather than dominate them, war-lord style. Image some of the world’s great dishes like Kanelbullar; beef rendang; lamb tagine; apple crumble; Franzbrotchen Buns or Teurgoule rice pudding – but without cinnamon to transform them. Across Sri Lanka the spice has found its way into dozens of classic island dishes including Watalappan, a spiced coconut and jaggery custard; Bibikkan; Dutch Lamprais; Kavum, sweet rice flour treacle fritters; as well as scores of common curries. Here at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel our chefs have used it to create a morish breakfast bun – the Kanelbullar Crocodile Croissant – a pastry made like the classic Sri Lankan sugar crocodile bun, shaped like a croissant and flavoured like a Swedish cinnamon Kanelbullar.

The growing spice likes it hot but not blistering – a steady temperature of around 25˚C to 32˚C. Although the soils best suited for its are reckoned to be the sandy white soils of Negombo, its demand for plenty of moisture means that it is also a firm fixture in the central hilly area of the country. 

It is grown most easily from seeds, 3-4 per pot, and planted out about 4 feet apart in these clusters, whose competing roots ensure a beautifully shrubby plant, best able to give off many branches to peel, and so limit the dangers of any one plant racing to become a fifteen metre tall tree.

Pruning starts at about eighteen months with cross branches taken out and the plants kept to a height of around three metres. Twice yearly harvesting occurs after about three years at which point the branches are cut, the leaves removed, and the outer layer of bark scraped off with a Surana Kurutta knife. The raw stems are rubbed with brass rods to squeeze out the oils; and then, with the aid of a special curved knife – a Koketta – the softer inner bark is then peeled to a target width, with different widths determining the final garde of the spice. 

Thirteen different grades are recognised, determined largely by the diameter of the quill. The highest, known as Alba, has quills that are less than 6mm in diameter. More typically are C4 - around 13 to 15mm in diameter; and C3 - between 15mm to 17mm in diameter. All three are known as “Heen Kurundu” or Smooth Cinnamon. “‘Gorosu Kurundu” incudes quills that up to 38 mm in diameter - typically used for grinding into cinnamon powder. The cinnamon sheaths are then dried in shade, curling inwards upon themselves; and the quills then placed on strings or racks to dry still further.

Among the world’s key spices, Sri Lankan cinnamon holds its own, costing up to $60 a kilo – more than cloves though less than saffron ($500 to $5,000 per pound); vanilla ($200 to $500 per pound); or cardamom ($30 per ounce). Less labour intensive and climatically fussy than saffron; without any of the pollination drams of vanilla; the harvesting quagmires of cloves or the complex choreography of cardamon collecting; and less prone to animal attacks than any of these, cinnamon, by dint of experiment and experience, has recommended itself as the lead spice that we grow at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, with bushes populating not just the Spice Garden itself but also several acres of hilly land that lie to the east and south east of the hotel, on Singing Civet Hill, and underplanted beneath aged coconuts that know no straight line .

Pepper is the second great indigenous spice for which Sri Lankan is righty famous. It is one of only two food items (the other being salt) to have earnt a place as one of the immutable fixtures at every table in almost every part of the world. Yet this extreme popularity belies its opulent history. Food historians have dated pepper’s first origins to the Malabar Coast of India – present day Kerala; and to around 2,000 BCE, by which time Adam’s Bridge, that frail corridor of land that connects India with northern Sri Lanka was already several thousand years ol...

Field guide; saga; pharmacy; pantry - this memoir of the Spice Garden at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in the jungle northwest of Kandy confirms that most elemental of Sri Lankan horticultural truths – that plants – all 7,500 of them found here – divide into just three categories. They are medicinal. They are edible. Or they are useless. 

Had we known this before things kicked off, life would have been much simpler; and plans far more straightforward. For, as with most plans, ours went off-mission within months, pursued across the neat pages of excel by the best intended of mission creeps. But God, as they say, is good; and no good God has much truck with plans of any sort. It took years to properly understand what a release this Plan Wilderness was; and just how unconditionally that most office Gulag of conditions had been trounced. Enslavement is a condition that takes time to undo. Even now, years later, I still place thankful and imaginary offerings of flowers and fruit before the alter of my imagined gods. As Mark Twain noted, “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.”

Servitude had begun to slide off, albeit unnoticed, just after the ceremonial signing of deeds to buy Mudhenna Wallawwa, the ancient crumbling plantation house and estate in the jungle northwest of Kandy. Over 30 people representing the sellers, attended by scores more attendants, met in an echoing room around a table that must have been related in some complex wooden way to that of State Banquet table in Windsor Castle. Signatories, witnesses, supporters, attestors, senior and junior legal counsels, tea bearers and not a few passers-by transmuted the transfer of a deed into a Dhurbar.

The plantation came with twenty five acres of land that had long since reverted to jungle – though rampant hints of what once grew in smug order (rubber, cocoa, coffee, coconut) could still be glimpsed. The estate had been abandoned during the 1988 JVP civil war, the family fleeing to the greater safety of Colombo. And, as with all things tropical, the land settled back comfortably into the loving hands of nature, with a sigh, as if all that building and harvesting, planting, and living was in some inexpressible way, a trifling and passing distraction, now best forgotten.

But possessing land is habit-forming. And soon enough our acquisition was followed by the purchase of more acres. And another house. Further acres, once part of the wider estate before it was decimated by Land Reforms, were incorporated on long term rents until the estate had more than doubled in size, the various land parcels threaded together by the slimmest of jungle tracks. 

One large plot was planted as vegetable beds but lay so trenchancy close to a misbehaved river that the onions, carrots, and sweet potatoes had little choice but to fester and moulder. Another was set aside to grow sandalwood trees. This, as it turned out, was a poor choice. Glamorous though the trees undoubtedly are, keeping them in the style to which they wish to become accustomed is harder even than keeping a mistress in Paris. The slightest variant in water resulted in sulky die-back. The tree’s high maintenance root system, which demanded the presence of other plant roots to attach to, meant a continual need to throw what amounted to hedonistic horticultural parties; and when all that had been sorted, Sandalwood Spike Disease arrived.

An entire valley was planted out with thousands of bananas, all of which succumbed to Fusarium wilt. Lemon grass was seeded on well drained hill sides, most of which caught fire during the drought. Mushrooms, a great favourite of our auditor, were added - more out of good manners than any real attempt to be commercial. 

The old rubber terraces were recklessly entrusted to a horticultural bandit who lacerated the trucks to produce quick flows of sap, injuring the trees for years to come. Terraces of new rubber trees were established. “Harvest the latex,” advised one enterprising land agent, “and move up the value chain.” Make didoes,” he went on to suggest: “the few on sale on the island are all expensive imports.”

Greenhouses of tomato and pepper were built and grown for the Maldivian hotel market until Spotted Wilt Virus raced through the plants, leaving behind such fruit as only the angriest chef might use. Several acres worth of nurseries to raise cinnamon, cloves and erica nuts were built, the tiny plants intended for resale onto the local agriculture board, though porcupine, gathering in force for nightly raids, had alternative ideas.

As the estate’s plantation workers grew into a small army, supervisors with, it turned out, imperfect circadian rhythms, were recruited to manage and mentor the mildly mutinous troops. On the hottest days, sleep under the shade of mango trees seemed the only option. One manager, tempted to distraction by thoughts of ill-gotten lucre, was later to be seen gazing woefully out from behind the bars of the castellated Bogambara Prison in downtown Kandy, built by the British and home to a grisly record of 524 executions, including that of the glamorous Sura Saradiel, the island’s fabled Robin Hood.

The only plants that readily seemed to work were spices. Ah – the wisdom of hindsight! The first of these rare flouring marvels were several acres of pepper planted to scramble up nitrogen fixing glericidia sticks. The vines proved valiantly resistant to animal attack; just glad to throw off long green clusters of pepper grapes. Plantations of clove trees also seemed to flourish; and in one distant corner of the estate, cinnamon, that most magical of all Sri Lanka’s indigenous spices, prospered with a lack of neediness that might move a hardened planter to tears of wonder and gratitude. 

Emboldened, we tried vanilla. Now as any spreadsheet junkie might tell you, vanilla is the sure route to becoming an overnight millionaire. As more and more people eat more and more chocolate, cocoa beans have barely manged to keep up with demand, with export prices oscillating from between $350 to $670 per kilo.

Our first crop was interplanted with our sad, and still in-recovery, rubber trees – by Francis, an aged and devoted Catholic plantation worker whose ancestry, once deciphered from a tin box of antique family documents going back to the 1890s, came in part from Scotland. Ever the old fashioned Scot, Francis was as fond of whiskey as he was of God. Every vanilla cutting was blessed before it was planted, his hand waving the form of the cross across the ambitious little plants. Completing the bedding-in of this new plantation took some considerable time and it became clear that shade-loving though they are, the amount of shade they had to endure under the rubber trees was just all too much.

Francis set to work, digging up each consecrated plant and transferring them to a new plantation, more open to sunlight, which corkscrewed down to a small pond. But the sanctified plants were no less miserable in their new spot, fighting off fungal rot, and periods where the water on offer was either too much or too meagre. And eventually they were moved a third time, though by now not by Francis who had left to meet his Maker.

In their new position and under the mindful eye of Ananda, now our head gardener, the vines finally prospered. As the first vanilla pods emerged, so too did the late but gratifying realisation that the best jungle gardening to be had was to stick to spices. We divested ourselves of the wilder outlying parts of the estate and focused our planting efforts on the twenty five...

This podcast is dedicated to uncovering the story of those most favoured of Sri Lankan spices that came to the island – just like tourists.  And then stayed. 

On the distant streets of the Old Bailey in London stands F. W. Pomeroy's famous 1906 statue of Justice hanging above the entrance to Central Criminal Court. The vast and gilded Amazonian holds in one hand the sword of justice and in the other the finely balanced scales of justice. And is in in thinking how Sri Lanka’s spice history might best fit into these scales that this distant statue comes to mind. 

On one side of the scales you might imagine lie the enticing black and red gold of the island’s indigenous pepper and cinnamon. These were the spices that drew in European colonists, enabling them to make untold profits and to better establish their sprawling foreign empires. And on the other, side of the scales are those spices – such as chilli, nutmeg, and vanilla - that the Europeans introduced to the island. 

It is of course an invidious comparison. Imperial apologists would want to throw in all sorts of other things from railways to constitutions, tea to telephones. Nationalists would meet each opening with equal or better examples to prove the opposite. It is a bill that remains in pyretic calculation. But for foodies and spice enthusiasts what remains, even before the cost is reckoned, is the exuberant existence of the spices themselves, however they arrived. 

Remarkably, though, it was Arab traders, not European colonists who made the greatest impact on the island’s spice heritage – if measured in terms of variety, range, and application. For it was through them that the final nine or so other spices so critical to the country’s character, first arrived: cloves; cardamom; coriander; cumin; fenugreek; pandam leaves; fennel; tamarind; and ginger. For these traders, working the ports of the Indian Ocean from Africa to Indonesia, they filled what was empty and emptied what was filled. 

“Run, run as fast as you can! You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread Man!”  And nor can you – for there is nothing to touch the taste of ginger. Known in more formal circles as Zingiber Officinale, it is a cultigen - one of those rare species that has been so altered by mankind as to no longer exist in its original wild state. 

Originating from the rainforest islands of SE Asia, it has been modified to fit human culinary and medicinal needs. It probably arrived in Sri Lanka with Arab traders, but its travel schedule is so ancient as to be all but lost. The Rig Veda, which dates to around 1400 BCE and is the world’s oldest Vedic text, mentions ginger; and later ayurvedic books elaborate its medicinal qualities - to reduce indigestion and nausea, stimulate the respiratory and nervous system; and, by improving blood circulation, act as an aphrodisiac. Recent scientific studies that have tabulated sexual function, fertility, and testosterone levels suggest that there may be something in this. Western science has also set in train a wave of further forensic research into the clinical applications of ginger – in cancer control, menstrual pain, glucose levels and in treating arthritis.

It is an easy plant to grow, demanding dappled shade, well-drained soil, and high humidity. Rhizomes with green growth buds are planted in shallow depressions; and before long green leaves, sometimes up to ten feet high, spread out, accompanied by pink or white flowers so perfect in their construction as to look as if they have sprung from moulds. Within eight months the roots can be harvested and the process restarted. 

Our own ginger, grown with a carefully defence mindset to ward off attacks by rampaging wild boar, lives in stone beds in the Spice Garden. At ten billion dollars and growing the global market for ginger outsteps production and so prices are higher than they really need to be. The culinary form of ginger has two main variants: white ginger – either large of small, the smaller variant being preferred for cooking; and red ginger, which is preferred in medicine. All these variants have scores of sub variants. The pale yellow flesh of Chinese ginger for example is preferred for pickles; Rangoon Ginger for oils and perfumes; and Indian ginger, like the tiny account of ginger grown in Sri Lanka, is most favoured in cooking and drinks for its much stronger taste. Its sweet, and citrusy flavour, as well as its peppery heat, alter in its preparation. When raw it is at its most pungent; dried, it is at its hottest; and cooked, it is at its sweetest. 

From ginger cakes, and ginger beer to stir fry ginger beef, it is used in many dishes across the world – but perhaps none so celebrated as with Gingerbread men. England’s first Queen Elizabeth even had an official royal gingerbread maker whose only role it was to make such pasties, once famously creating edible clones of all the foreign dignitaries who assembled at her 16th century court. In Sri Lanka it is especially favoured in chicken and sambal dishes.

Older even than Harry Pottrer’s Dumbledore, Tamarind, native to Africa, has been growing in India and probably Sri Lanka since at least 1300 BCE, roughly the same time as the civilizations of the late Bronze age around the Mediterranean collapsed. It has godly properties, being included in the Book of Enoch, one of those texts that was banned from inclusion in the Bible; and in the Hindu Epic, the Ramayana, a text that Hindus believe dates back 1.2 million years; though scholars argue for a later date - around 5,000 BCE. Certainly, it was old enough to be included in some of the earliest Indian Ayurvedic texts – the Charaka Samhita, the Sushruta Samhita, and the Nighantus. Its very name appears to hint at its travel history, "tamarind" being derived from the Arabic phrase “tamar hindi” which meant "Indian date." Commonly added to ayurvedic medicines to treat constipation, digestive disorders, arthritis, blood disorders, wounds, and cell health, it is now undergoing deeper scientific studies for its pharmacological properties, helping with asthma, liver problems, diabetes, and dysentery.

Tamarind’s primary compound, tartaric acid, is what gives it its sour flavour – this characteristic being the reason it is so liked in Thai and Indian dishes for the gentle and complex layer of acidity it adds to curries, soups, stews, chutneys, sauces, as well as in desserts, and drinks. It pops up in Massaman, Rassam, and Pad Tha; in tamarind jam in Costa Rica; tamarind beer in the Bahamas and, since 1876, England’s legendary Lea & Perrins’ Worcestershire sauce. In Sri Lanka it is most widely used in fish, chicken, and pork curries. It grows as a long-living evergreen tree, reaching heights of eighty feet in good sun and well able to live through droughts. Lightly covered with pinnate leaves, its modest red and yellow flowers develop into hard six inch knobbly pods, the flesh within them being the best part of the tree to use. 

Its cousin, in bitterness at least, is fenugreek, a plant which, though originating in Turkey six thousand years ago, became so widespread as to appear with residential ease in the texts, medicines and recipes of the first Mesopotamian and Indian civilizations, as well as those of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. Use it, advised the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE, to embalm the dead, purify the air, and cleanse the tummy. A main component of ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine, it was regarded with great suspicion by western medicine – until recently. It is now enjoying an investigative renaissance as labourites around the world probe its antidi...

Sri Lanka’s generous habit of annexing new ingredients is one of the more positive ways in which it has reacted to the very mixed impact made on it by the island’s spice-mad colonial occupiers; and its traders. To the nine core spices indigenous to the island since the earliest of times, - cinnamon, pepper, long pepper, brindleberries, moringa, curry leaves, gutu kula, the blue butterfly pea flower, and turmeric – up to thirteen others have been introduced through the centuries and have become so commonplace as to be now classified as fully fledged residents.  The list includes chilli, cloves, cardamom, ginger, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, pandam leaves, fennel, tamarind, nutmeg, mace; and vanilla.

And four of these, the subject of this podcast - chilli, nutmeg, mace; and vanilla - arrived on the island courtesy of its occupying colonists: the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. 

The most famous of these, chilli, a spicy vegetable widely used throughout Asia, only reached Asia in the past five hundred years, originating from Peru and Bolivia before being brought to the attention of a marvelling Spanish court by Christopher Columbus after his first voyage to the new world. In the diaries he kept on his voyage Colombus noted the existence of this new plant in an entry dated 15 January 1493 saying it was “a better spice than our pepper”. Within decades chilli had become a commonplace plant in Spanish gardens and by the mid fifteen hundreds it was to be found as a cooking ingredient from Scandinavia to the Balkans. 

And almost as quickly the plant also found its way to Sri Lanka, and other parts of Asia, due in large part to the Portuguese and their commercial thirst to control the Indian Ocean trade - and with it, its lucrative spice revenues. The spice’s adoption into Sri Lankan cooking came with an etymological twist for the Singhala term for pepper (“miris”) was transferred to chilli. Pepper was renamed “gam-miris” – literally “village pepper.”  Its penetration across the island semes to have been slow if the journals of Robert Knox the famous British captive of the King of Kandy is anything to go by. Knox’s book, “The Historical Relation of Ceylon” published in 1681, recorded just about anything that moved and most things that didn’t. And it fails to mention chilli. More than anything else this probably indicated the limited reach of the Portuguese settlement, which never properly incorporated the highlands of the Kandyan kingdom.

Rich in such vitamins as A, C and E, chilli’s natural chemical compounds, especially capsaicinoid, have prompted a wave of on-going scientific research into harnessing it to promote weight loss, relieve pain from arthritis, reduce inflammation, control LDL (bad) cholesterol to lower the risk of strokes and heart attacks and regulate blood sugar.  Some studies have also indicated its potential use in killing cancer cells.

But it is of course for its taste and flavour that it is most widely celebrated. And in this regard, there are as many influences as there are outcomes. Different varieties of pepper, their ripeness, colour, drying process and growing conditions – all influence how exactly its tastes, and smells. Smokey? Fruity? Grassy? Tart? Warm? Hot? Blistering? The vegetable’s extraordinary range and adaptability has ensured it can cover all these bases and more, making it one of the kitchen’s most flexible ingredients. From chilli pickle to chilli con carne, many of the dishes to which chilli adds its flavour have become household items everywhere. Barely a dish in Sri Lanka fails to include it – from sambals and curries to the sweetly exquisitely spicy banana pepper curry - and of course Lunu Miris, one of the island’s top pickles, made from finely chopped onions, red chili flakes, salt, lime juice, and Maldive fish, and able to go with just about anything. Foodies like to debate which cuisines tends to be hotter – Sri Lankan or Indian. But the answer is far from straightforward as it all depends on which regions you have in mind: the Chettinad or Kandy; Galle or Rajasthan; Tamil Nadu or Jaffna?

Three other spices, vanilla, nutmeg and its derivative, mace, also all arrived on the island courtesy of European colonists. 

Although not hatched from a single silver egg like the mythical Molionidai twins Eurytos and Kteatos, nutmeg and mace are, all the same, the conjoined twins of the spice world, being two quite separate kinds of spcies that derive from the same plant – Myristica fragrans. The nutmeg part of it is the hard round seed found within the fruit; it has a powerful musky flavour, woody, a little sweet, and unmistakably aromatic. The mace is the reddish orange membrane that surrounds the seed, with a scent that hardened Olfactors would describe as floral, citrus, light and delicate.

The tree that bears them is slow growing, deciduous, relatively tight in spread but able to reach heights of twenty to thirty meters. As you would expect from so special a spice, the trees inhabit the fussy end of propagation, demanding rich well drained soil at around 500 meters, nicely distributed rainfall of about 2,500 mm per year, a decent amount of shade, especially in their first years, and temperatures that range from between 20 to 30 degrees. 

The trees have a staggeringly constrained commercial history, with all specimens across the world deriving from plants that once only grew on the Banda Islands, a collection of islets that make up the 17,508 islands that is Indonesia today. Identified by the Portuguese as a major revenue earner, the spice became one of the most tightly controlled monopolies of the Indian Ocean trade. The Arab traders who, till then had been carrying and selling it across the region were muscled out and, until 1621, the Portuguese managed to keep trade in this spice to themselves. Naturally, this also meant a tight grip on production, and the various Portuguese governors across the East Indies took special care to ensure that no live pants escaped from Banda.

When eventually the Dutch stormed the Banda Islands and wrested control of nutmeg from the Portuguese, little other than control really changed. The Dutch VOC Company maintained as tight a grip and monopoly of the spice’s production, transport, and marketing as their colonial predecessors. This state of affairs continued until 1810 when the British captured most of the Dutch East Indies territories, including the Banda Islands. Although the islands were later returned to the Dutch 4 years later, the British by then had taken particular care to uproot as many nutmeg trees as possible for distribution and regrowth across its own Empire – including Sri Lanka, which it gained formally in 1802 at the Treaty of Amiens. 

It is possible that the monopoly has been more quietly ended a few years earlier if reports of the Frenchy seizing a cargo of Dutch nutmeg trees and carrying them off to the Caribbean are to be believed. Either way, the nutmeg monopoly had been ended and by the early eighteenth century the first nutmeg plantations in South Asia were recorded in Kerela, just across the sea from Sri Lanka itself, the work of an enterprising Scottish planter. Exactly when they came to Sri Lanka and where they were first planted is a matter of mildly rumbustious academic debate.

The global market for both spcies is relatively small in value – oscillating at around 250 million dollars annually, half coming from Indonesia, with Sri Lanka making up about five percent of the total, mostly from small plantations around Kandy, Kegalle, and Matale. But not Galagedera sadly for the nutmeg trees that once grew here ha...