Sri Lanka It's Happening

May 6, 2004

For a long long time there have been two animal sightings that eluded me. One was the Ceylon (Sri Lanka) jungle fowl the other is the leopard. The closest I have come to seeing either of these was in yala where I so leopard tracks!

Yesterday was my lucky day, I managed to get a glimpse of the elusive bird. The access road from Great Western to the main road is badly rutted, so we took a detour through some estate roads and a jungle fowl just ran across the road a few meters ahead of us.

I was greatly suprised that they live in such high altitudes, there aren't any houses for quite some distance so it's unlikely to have been a Rooster gone wild. The male rooster of the village backyards looks very different from it's counter part in other countries (at least from the pictures i have seen of them), and looks a lot closer to the jungle fowl. Maybe these roosters were descendents from the wild birds that were domesticated thousands of years ago.