What can I say about Sinharaja - well it’s very hot and humid, it’s full of leeches and it has one of the bumpiest windiest roads leading up to it but it has fantastic birding!
Yellow Naped Woodpecker
Crested Treeswift
Green Imperial Pigeon
The track up to Sinharaja (Wayne and Chaminda)
Chaminda feeding the chickens! Jungle Fowl were never this easy in Thailand.
Blue Magpie
Changeable Hawk Eagle
Leeched again!
Hill Myna
…and us English know a good one from a bad one and I can confirm that in all our travels around the world Sri Lanka out performs everyone in the tea stakes! So….
Tea at the Blue Magpie Lodge, Sinharaja where not only did they produce the best cup of tea in Sri Lanka but also the best “rice and curry”
Tea Plantation at Nuwara Eliya
Tour of the tea factory!
This was unbelievable - a tea grinding machine made over a hundred years ago in a town ten miles from where we live in the UK!!
Lunch at the Blue Magpie Lodge
Totally unlike any Pitta I have seen - this one seemed to love posing for the camera, normally Pittas skulk around in the dark and you get a fleeting glimpse if you’re lucky.
Whilst smaller than their African counterparts the Sri Lankan Elephants are the largest of the Asian Elephants - these images were all taken in Yala NP.
Ceylon Hanging Parrot
Plum Headed Parakeet
Yellow-fronted Barbet
Brown-headed Barbet
Layards Parakeet
Young Layards Parakeet which crashed dived in front of us!
Sri Lanka Little Barbet
Can never get over the size of these fruit eating bats - this large roost must have contained close to a thousand bats.
Sri Lanka has just two Hornbills - the endemic Ceylon/Sri Lanka Grey Hornbill and the Malabar Pied Hornbill
Malabar Pied Hornbills
Tissa is a lovely area with a beautiful man made reservoir teaming with Water Hyacinth and birds whilst Bundala is a vast area covered in waders - we could have had a week in this area alone.
Cotton Pygmy Goose
Lesser Whistling duck
Purple Heron
Small Pratincole
Great Thick knee
Whilst in Bundala NP our guide had a call from the Park HQ to say they had found a bird on the beach and could we identify it - we were amazed to find this Brown Skua in a dusbin completely oiled up. A lifer for our guide and Park Rangers although I doubt if it survived.
Black Bittern
Yellow Bittern
Indian Pond Heron
Darter
Pheasant Tailed Jacana
Yellow Wattled Lapwing
