In the company of giants

There are creatures so magnificent that words and pictures cannot capture them, experiences so vivid they must be lived. This morning the creatures we saw were too magnificent and the experience too vivid, but try to express them in words I must. This morning we saw blue whales.

That the blue whales found in the Indian Ocean are the laughably named pygmy blue whale is taxonomically interesting (though their taxonomy is far from clear) but irrelevant. Smaller than the blue whales of high latitude seas they may be; magnificent they are no less for it.

We sailed from Mirissa port in a storm of terns: whiskered, gull-billed, common, great crested and, a little further offshore, exquisitely long-winged bridled terns. Not long after sailing our spotters called to the captain to guide him towards distant blows; but distant blows soon became not distant blows and we found ourselves in the company of pygmy blue whales. A tall, columnar blow, the ridge of the whale’s back and three seconds (always three seconds) after the blow the diminutive and diagnostic dorsal fin. After a dozen or more blows, a stronger curve to the back, a raised tail and perfect stillness on the ocean’s surface once more.

For two hours we watched a small group of these phenomenal animals, seeing three identifiable whales and perhaps a fourth. The one we saw most – five times – had a large notch cut from its already tiny dorsal fin. Another had a big pale splodge in its tail. And at least one other had no notch and no splodge. Each had whalesuckers attached to its tail or back: another extraordinary creature, on an extraordinary morning.

As we sailed elated home we passed through a feeding flock of whiskered terns, containing numerous smaller, perkier white-winged terns. Six species of tern in a morning. But when blessed with the company of pygmy blue whales, who’s counting?

Marine marvels from this morning

	Mammals
36	pygmy blue whale	Balaenoptera musculus indica
	Birds
349	common tern	Sterna hirundo
350	bridled tern	Sterna anaethetus
351	white-winged tern	Chlidonias leucopterus
352	Indian peafowl	Pavo cristatus
353	white-bellied sea-eagle	Haliaeetus leucogaster
	Fish
2	whalesucker	Remora australis

2012 Totals

Mammals: 36

Birds: 353

Reptiles: 7

Amphibians: 3

Fish: 2

A colonial inheritance

Driving from Colombo’s international airport at Negombo, through the capital and from there through miles of farmland, the hand of the British Empire may be seen everywhere. The city is beautiful and, though greatly favoured by its location on the shore of the Indian Ocean, it’s hard not to make unfair comparison with the capital of the next post-colonial republic to the north. Delhi and Colombo both, on their respective scales, have much graceful Victorian and post-Victorian architecture, but whereas Delhi has until recently been tumbledown, grimy and littered, with potholes in her streets and rhesus monkeys running riot through her seats of power, Colombo, at least the parts through which we drove this morning, is neat and brisk and polished. The streets are immaculately tarmacked with tidy lines painted on them, the gardens are full of frangipanis in fleshy coral flower and, despite the muggy tropical heat, there is an air of wholesomeness and purpose about her. She is a stylish sea-front city, with architectural wonders, old and new, including a dramatic new arts pavilion, funded by China, the old parliament building gazing out to sea, and the stylish new parliament, designed by prominent Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa, housed on an island in a giant lake. What a clever idea to put all the politicians on an island. I wonder who controls the causeway: the people or the politicians?

There are natural delights here too: a spot-billed pelican perched on a lamppost over a bustling street, three painted storks feeding in a manicured urban tank right by the corridors of power, and a crowd of Indian flying foxes making slow-motion circuits over their roost in a park. Just outside the city, as we enter the rice paddies, where the harvest is taking place, weeks ahead of the crop I saw last week in the Sunderbans, a chequered keelback snake swims across a storm drain.

The second footprint of the empire is all across the landscape, in the miles and miles of rubber plantations which cover the gentle hillscape south of the city. I know this plant from the forests of Parque Nacional Noel Kempff Mercado on the border of Bolivia and Brazil but here, in cultivation, it is a major export. Along the edges of the plantations, where fringes of natural vegetation remain, I saw southern purple-faced leaf-monkeys five times, often in the tops of distant trees, but it was all but impossible for me to show them to clients as we sped along Sri Lanka’s excellent highway south from the capital. Highways are a buzzword here, the World Bank having financed an enormous expansion programme with the cessation of violence. They also seem to have funded a white-throated kingfisher scheme as there’s one on a power line every mile along the whole length of the road.

We stopped for tea at a small restaurant whose owner had lost his entire family in the tsunami, just some of nearly 40,000 Sri Lankans alone who died in this now all but forgotten tragedy; forgotten the more because the sea-scene from the restaurant is a clichéd tropical idyll and it’s hard for us to conjur an image of such horror and terror.

Reaching our hotel in Mirissa, we made a plan to walk in the late afternoon as the heat abated. It didn’t but we walked anyway. Trees rustled with toque macaques and with more southern purple-faced leaf-monkeys, this time very easy to see and very dapper with it. Here too a big roost of Indian flying foxes, their bodies the joyous gold of demerara sugar. A male Loten’s sunbird paid a visit and brick-red resident Sri Lankan red-rumped swallows hawked overhead the while.

Tonight we’ve all stumbled early to bed and rightly so as no-one slept last night. And tomorrow we take to the high seas with leviathans in our sights.

Today’s Sri Lankan newbies

	Mammals
34	southern purple-faced leaf-monkey	Trachypithecus vetulus vetulus
35	toque macaque	Macaca sinica
	Birds
344	southern hill myna	Gracula indica
345	white-bellied drongo	Dicrurus caerulescens
346	painted stork	Mycteria leucocephala
	Sri Lanka red-rumped swallow	Hirundo daurica hyperthyra
347	Indian robin	Saxicoloides fulicatus
348	Loten’s sunbird	Cinnyris lotenius
	Reptiles
7	chequered keelback	Xenochropis piscator

2012 Totals

Mammals: 35

Birds: 348

Reptiles: 7

Amphibians: 3

Fish: 1

Steamy spring

As I step out in the cool-by-comparison of early morning, two blue-tailed bee-eaters perch atop a red and white telecom mast, giving their loud sandpapery bleat as they take flight. A mile or two to sea lowers a slaty rainstorm. It seems unlikely the promised rain could make this place any more damp; though it might move the damp around a little.

News comes from Yorkshire of early-arriving sand martins and avocets back at their breeding site; and from the USA of spring amphibians with poetic names: New Jersey chorus frog, wood frog, spring peeper and southern leopard frog. While I sweat out the Sri Lankan spring, keep on keeping me posted of spring far to the north. 

Today I have a meeting with Dhammi, the celebrated Sri Lankan naturalist with whom I'll be working over the next week on Naturetrek's Blue Whales and Leopards tour. Tomorrow morning our clients arrive at around 2.30am. I'll be needing coffee.

New today

	Birds
343	blue-tailed bee-eater	Merops philippinus

2012 Totals

Mammals: 33

Birds: 343

Reptiles: 6

Amphibians: 3

Fish: 1

Tooday too much me happy

Meet Nishanthi, the beautiful lady who cooks and cleans in my Negombo guest house, and smiles and sways by in long, patterned cotton skirts. This morning at breakfast I asked her how she was and she answered, ‘Tooday too much me happy my grendaughter birday.’ How old, I asked, was her granddaughter today? ‘Phi year ol,’ was the reply. Happy birthday Ashwini.

Last night I ate Sri Lankan. I’m led to believe that in a couple of months I may regain the feeling in my tongue. I lie: apart from the Donner und Blitzen pickle smouldering at the edge of the plate, which was introduced by the charming and impressively tubby restaurateur as ‘this spicy’, my vegetable curry was wonderfully layered in flavour; shamefully cheap too. 

House crows must be the most under-appreciated birds in all Asia. They suffer in public opinion, no doubt, through their great abundance and through being black; though when looked at, really looked at, they are as their scientific name Corvus splendens implies creatures of resplendent beauty. Their mantles and long, sharp wings are the lustrous blue-black of spilled petrol, their necks and breasts the warm grey of wood ash, their masks the absolute black of a no-stars night, and their bills are long and down-curved, as a Nepali khukuri. I'm sure they just need some PR help to get the good press they deserve. Make it your mission to love a house crow today. 

 

Some news from New Jersey, courtesy of our stateside correspondent Chris:

It is rather spring-like. Daffodils are popping, blooming bittercress in fields. Eurasian collared doves are carrying nest material. Canadas are getting territorial around patches of cattails and don't like flocking as much as they did a week or two ago. Black scoters can be heard wailing, even if one isn't on the beach, if the wind is right. Robins, cardinals and chickadees are getting quite vocal in the morning. I think I'm going on a hunt for the first piping plover today.

Enjoy the spring everyone. Send me news of your chiffchaffs and your Sandwich terns.

A band of birders

The dauntless birders from Naturetrek's recent Brahmaputra Cruise, posteriors recorded for posterity by Jane Allen. We're in Gibbon Wildlife Sanctuary, looking at who knows what. Jane's husband Dave, who features in the photo, suggests the caption, 'Who didn't eat all the pies?' Answer: the one who also neglected to wear his leech socks. Leech socks are for grown-ups.

Close cousins

A feral golden langur at Umananda temple in Assam, unimpressed by the advances of a similarly gangly primate. With thanks for the photo to Brahmaputra Cruise participant Jane Allen.

Allegiance and an alphabet

I slip out of my guest house at dawn, to stretch my legs before the onset of the heat and humidity of the day. Watching a pair of purple-rumped sunbirds sprite about a butterfly-flowered Bauhinia I hear the cheery snap of a pale-billed flowerpecker who joins the sunbirds for a dawn fix of sugar. As I walk towards the old town of Negombo the neon lights of the beach-tourist strip fade and Sri Lanka herself begins, youthful, smile-eyed and devout. A boy whose newly-long legs poke from royal blue school shorts earnestly bows his head before an idol of the dying Christ. Across the street a tall man in a long lungi emerges from a wedding-cake temple, his ash-smeared forehead announcing his devotion to Lord Siva.

Buses of children, their faces barely big enough to hold their smiles, trundle cheerfully in all directions, no-one here in any doubt that education is an honour and a duty. All their uniforms are immaculately white, red or blue ribbons and ties declaring school allegiances. On signs and billboards everywhere English competes with the fat, contented curls of written Sinhala; competition and allegiance the seeming subtext of everything in this still riven country.

A crow clips me above the ear. This to my knowledge is only the fourth time I have been touched by a wild bird. Years ago in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, on one of my thousands of dawn walks, a roadside hawk thumped me on the back of my neck, with no provocation I could discern. In the Galápagos magnificent frigatebirds tip-touched me with their wings as, a deck below, the cook tossed scraps of fish for them. And on the rooftop of my grubby, familiar hotel in Delhi, where I have made friends, learned Bollywood songs, and stumbled over hours of Hindi conversation, a black kite whacked me about the head as I stood one evening watching the kabootar baz whistling to their fast-winged flocks of pigeons.

Walking back along the beach I see a gull-billed tern making lines along the surf. These gorgeous birds have always an air of composure and of competence about them. A professional tern if ever there was one, of a different mould from the jerky, tin-toy little tern and the shaggy, flap-winged Sandwich.

I still believe the most beautiful alphabet was created by the Sinhalese. The insect of ink curves into a shape that is almost sickle, spoon, eyelid. The letters are washed blunt glass which betrays no jaggedness. Sanskrit was governed by verticals, but its sharp grid features were not possible in Ceylon. Here the Ola leaves which people wrote on were too brittle. A straight line would cut apart the leaf and so a curling alphabet was derived from its Indian cousin. Moon coconut. The bones of a lover’s spine.

Michael Ondaatje

Running in the Family

New this morning

	Birds
341	pale-billed flowerpecker	Dicaeum erythrorhynchos
342	gull-billed tern	Gelochelidon nilotica

2012 Totals

Mammals: 33

Birds: 342

Reptiles: 6

Amphibians: 3

Fish: 1