location: southeastmost cabin, The Other Corner, Habarana, Sri Lanka
At around sunrise I got up so I could join a group walk along the edge of a reservoir adjacent to The Other Corner to look for any wildlife we might be able to see. Despite the ungodly hour, it seemed like a good activity to participate in, since it was all about nature and not about culture at all, and nature was the only thing I'd really been enjoying on this tour of Sri Lanka. To my surprise, most of the people on our tour were also up early to go for the walk, including Gretchen, who showed up a little late after realizing she couldn't get back to sleep. We started out walking through the on-site garden, which featured some interesting plants like black pepper, what Old-World civilizations had to use to provide chemical heat before the discovery of the New World.
The reservoir itself was a fairly typical Sri Lankan "lake", the kind made by King Pandukabhaya and his successors hundreds and even thousands of years ago with armies of men wielding picks and shovels to create earthen dikes. There were a smattering of egrets and one or two herons out in the water and at some point one of our guides (which included Jiva and couple guys from The Other Corner) spotted a darter, a long-necked bird that Americans would call an anhinga. Later we saw the darter swimming, which is an amazing sight, as somehow the only part of the bird sticking out of the water is the long, skinny neck.
Further along the reservoir, we went down the manmade embankment holding back the water, when through a narrow strip of jungle, and emerged in a rice paddy. Rice paddies are everywhere in Sri Lanka, and they're defined by tiny versions of the ridges used to make the ancient reservoirs. The one we entered was irrigated by a loud pump pulling water from the reservoir, a task that looked to me like it would be possible to do with a siphon alone, as the reservoir's water was likely higher than the rice paddy. We walked a short distance along the edge of the paddy to a tree full of weaverbird nests. These were amazing creations that each featured a woven ball containing the nest and a sock-like entrance draping below it. The birds actually make it so the entrance goes to a blind alley and the bird must no where, along the way, there is a secret entrance to the nest itself. We were told this was to confuse snakes, though it was hard to imagine how a snake would even be able to position himself on the tree in a way that would allow him to enter the end of the socklike structure.
Walking back the way we came along the earthen dam, we eventually arrived at a concrete spillway. Somewhere near there, our guide caught sight of a jackal stalking an ibis. But our presence spooked the ibis and the jackal had to give up on his hunt. I should mention that there was a "farm dog" with us this whole time who appaently lives in The Other Corner's garden somewhere, and he seemed to very much be enjoying the walk. At the end, he chased after a peacock when he saw one, which is seemingly one of his jobs, as peacocks are common in this part of Sri Lanka and they're not good for either gardens or rice paddies.
After another fairly good breakfast (at least by Sri Lankan standards), it was off to our next destination. It being early in the morning, farmers from the nearby rice paddies had spread out rice on the paved roadway, often completely filling an entire lane. The black asphalt apparently helps the rice dry quickly, though the presence of rice forced vehicles in both directions to use the same narrow strip of asphalt not covered with rice. I don't know how the tradition of using paved highways to dry rice developed, but it's an accepted part of Sri Lankan culture. It's the kind of cultural practice that could never develop in the United States, where vehicles have all the rights on the highway and drivers are too selfish to be inconvenienced by the needs of someone intruding into their god-given right-of-way. People in the United States would just drive over the rice, which would quickly ruin it, and the tradition would never get started. Similarly, drivers in Sri Lanka seem unusually conscious of other things they shouldn't be driving over in the roadway, including street dogs, who occasionally occupy lanes and often seem reluctant to move out of the way. Drivers respect them as well. Those dogs would be doomed in the United States, if only because of the high frequency of driving while intoxicated.
The bus drove us to Galkadwala, a homestead-cum-meeting-venue in a section of jungle recovering from slash-and-burn agriculture. The woman who runs it has surrounded herself with five or six rescue dogs and built a beautiful compound using various techniques, including stacked stone walls (they superficially appear dry-stacked, but if you look carefully you can see tiny amounts of mortar). We were directed to an open-air presentation space in the back, and it took a surprisingly long time for Jiva, Panchali the elephant activist we'd met last night, and the Galkadwala people to get a laptop to display its PowerPoint presentation correctly on a projector.
For the next couple hours, Panchali gave a presentation about the sad situation for elephants in Sri Lanka. Not only are elephants routinely trapped, shot, and killed with methods such as explosives (often by farmers upset by the havoc they wreak on their crops), but they're also inadvertently caught by traps set for other animals. Then there is the issue of elephant exploitation. Elephants cannot be domesticated; they can only be tamed. So any elephant one sees in the possession of humans must've been caught as a baby from the wild. And to do so, the mother often has to be killed, since she will not peacefully let her child be taken away. According to Panchali, there are maybe three or four thousand wild elephants in Sri Lanka, and they are killed at an average rate of about one per day. Some fraction of tame elephants belong to temples, where they are kept in chains and fed food that isn't good for them. Periodically they are taken out to participate in parades, where the whole-body outfits they are made to wear cause them to overheat. Panchali also told the story of an elephant who was given as a gift to Sri Lanka by the king of Thailand. The elephant eventually was given to a Buddhist temple, where he was mistreated for years until activism (led in part by the speaker) led to the elephant being returned to Thailand.
Gretchen and I only heard snippets of this presentation, because pretty early in the sad story, we decided we couldn't take it and slipped off behind a building, where we watched for birds and monkeys in the jungle. Maybe some audiences need to be made aware of the situation with elephants, but Gretchen and I know it's terrible and we don't need the psychic burden. This is particularly true of Gretchen, who struggles with depression.
Our slipping off did not go unnoticed, so when it was brought up, Gretchen said that Panchali was doing amazing work but we just couldn't take the sad stories. But, she allowed, there are definitely some audiences that need to hear them, particularly the people who come to Sri Lanka expecting to be able to ride an elephant.
At some point in the middle of this, the staff of Galkadwala brought over refreshments, which included tea, a dessert item, and something spicy that had been breaded and deep-fried. I had the tea and four of that last thing, which kind of ruined my appetite for the lunch that happened not that much later.
Lunch was served family-style in the semi-outdoors upstairs of the main lodge, on a level whose floor consisted of steel plates punched through with small holes. There were some good foods provided, but, as I said, I'd ruined my appetite.
After lunch, we walked down the driveway back to the road where the bus was parked. A couple of Galkadwala's dogs tagged along until we crossed into the territory of another dog who was hanging out near some water buffalos. Along the way, we saw a couple huge monitor lizards hanging out in a drainage ditch.
From Galkadwala, we drove directly to Kaudulla National Park to see wild elephants now that we were completely briefed on their plight. Our bus driver let us out near the jeeps (or Jeep-like vehicles, some of which had unfamiliar makes and had been manufactured in India) we would be riding into the park (we would not be allowed out of them), and so we immediately selected what jeeps we would be riding in. Gretchen's father cleverly noted where Panchali the elephant activist had put her bag and decided to ride with her, and Gretchen's mother, Gretchen, and I climbed into that jeep as well. The other jeeps divided up our group in interesting ways, with, for example, all the single women in our group (there were four or five) all together in one of the jeeps. (This caused Gretchen and me to sing the chorus to "All the Single Ladies" several times, though I also referred to that jeep as the "Eat, Pray, Love" jeep.) For some reason we spent an unusually long time just parked there as some issue about the number of people in one of the jeeps was figured out, and it reminded me of the problem with the PowerPoint computer back at Galkadwala.
Finally we got moving, rolling past the massive concrete structure at the outflow of the reservoir at the heart of Kaudulla. From there, we drove through a section of jungle, seeing occasional peafowl along the way.
And then we drove out into the open, a wide grassy margin around the reservoir. According to our Panchali, this grass was the result of periodic flooding, which keeps trees from growing in the lower land near the water. This flooding was no accident; it's actually regularly engineered to happen on a specific schedule so that there will be grass for grazing at specific times of the year that the elephants learned to plan for. Apparently in the past there was a year when the reservoir water was not allowed to recede, and that year the elephants failed to come to the park. It seems grass is one of their favorite things to eat. (This confirms that they can digest cellulose.)
Off in the distance, I could see our first wild elephants. But even closer was a single elephant standing in the shade of a tree. This was an immature male elephant suffering from a painful injury, a ring of infection around one of his front limbs, probably after it got caught in an animal snare and then got infected. The snare was no longer there, but it looked swollen, and the poor elephant was holding the limb up as if it was the source of pain. This was our first up-close elephant, and we were already seeing how much it sucks to be an elephant in Sri Lanka. (Sri Lanka has the population of New York State crammed into an island half that size, so it's impossible for elephants not to do things that humans dislike. But elephants are also a huge resource, as it is one of the few things that might attract Western tourists.) Panchali would go on to alert park employees about the injured elephant so that he could be shot with a dart containing antibiotics.
We then drove over to the elephants we'd seen in the distance, and it turned out that they were all males. Adult males are not allowed in the matriarch-dominated herds that contain most of the elephants, so they go off to form their own groups, usually comprised of an older male and several younger "apprentices." That might sound like a joke, but elephants have considerable cultural knowledge, and it must be passed from elephant to elephant in the various ways they communicate and model behaviors. Unfortunately, these elephants also showed signs of unfortunate encounters with humans. At least two of them had multiple small lumps on their haunches that Panchali said were the results of being shot.
After seeing that group of males, we drove for miles without seeing any more elephants, though we did see plenty of birds, mostly water birds like egrets, herons, pelicans, and even another darter. Periodically we'd also see peafowl, which are much more common than I would've ever expected. I was also noting a small somewhat non-descript bird that liked to stand atop little objects (such as rocks or elephant droppings) as if to get a better view. This was, I would later learn, the paddyfield pipit. I also got a glimps of a bird I recognized from Uganda, a bird with massive eyes called a thick-knee.
At some point Panchali got information that the female heard of elephants was not far ahead. When we arrived upon them, there were at least a dozen elephants in the herd, some spread out and five or six together in a tight group not far from the water's edge. A cluster of six or seven jeeps had stopped near the core of herd. As we approached, we saw one of the elephants had just taken a shit and a piss and her vagina seemed to be sagging as almost a sort of duct nearly reaching the ground. Gretchen thought it looked weird, and I Panchali agreed. It certainly didn't look like the vaginas of the other elephants. The elephant also looked pregant, so Panchali wondered if she was in the process of giving birth. So she motioned for the other jeeps to cut their engines and make things as quiet as possible. She also communicated with Zach by phone, as he was at least 100 feet away, across a gap between two clusters of jeeps (about half of which were of people who weren't part of our group). In the absence of direct communication, I was surprised how quickly everyone seemed to get that something very interesting was happening, although at some point one the jeeps decided to cross the gap between our jeep clusters, something Panchali shut down as quickly as she could using body language alone. In some ways, in this context, she was behaving sort of like a park ranger, though she had no actual authority.
Meanwhile the pregnant elephant with the drooping vagina looked to be straining, as if trying to pass an enormous turd. She'd stoop like a shitting dog and then maybe she would piss or even shit, but nothing else would come of it. But clearly something was happening, despite what Gretchen's father thought (he was pretty sure the elephant was not giving birth). As the elephant strained more and more and things began to happen (some water came out that clearly had blood in it, for example), Panchali started muttering a prayer to the god who protects elephants in whatever religious system she belongs to. As things built to a crescendo, Gretchen and Panchali held hands.
And then, just like that, a large white object came out of the duct-like vagina and appeared on the ground. At that point all (or perhas most) of the elephants, who had been silently grazing, lifted their trunks and trumpeted. They then began marching around the newborn as it emerged from the amniotic sack. Some were making a deep roaring sound one could feel one's body while another continued to trumpet. It was, as you might imagine, an amazing spectacle to behold. I don't think I've ever been as moved by the primal assertiveness of nature like this except, perhaps, that time Gretchen and I saw the total eclipse of the sun.
The adults in this little subgroup of the herd were all involved in welcoming the baby elephant into the world. They pulled up dirt and dust with their trunks and used it to dust the newborn. They also took turns in helping him (we later learned he was a boy) to his feet, something he was doing within a minute of being born. Meanwhile, the matriarch of the herd, who wore a bulky GPS tracker around her neck like a retro-sci-fi signifier of her authority, broke free from the herd to do some additional trumpeting and to inspect some of the nearby jeeps to make sure nobody was planning on "acting a fool." (This caused our Australian friends from Cambodia in their jeep nearby to duck down beneath the rollbars.)
Eventually the baby elephant was standing reliably enough to be coaxed into taking his first steps, so the adults around him stood on either side of him to form moving walls of support, sort of like training wheels, and then they all started marching slowly towards the jungle through the gap betweem our two clusters of jeeps. As the adults walked, they reached out with their trunks or held a leg low and parallel to better support the baby as they walked. At this time, some of the elephants that had been further away came over to meet the youngest elephant in Sri Lanka.
Wtinessing a wild elephant give birth is an unusual thing, so Panchali kept saying how lucky we were. This was the first elephant birth she'd ever seen, and even her driver, who takes people to look at the elephants every day, had only seen it happen once before. The only other animal I've seen give birth is goats, and, while that's a minor miracle, it hardly compares to an elephant birth. Big part of what makes the latter so special is the ceremony that the elephants themselves bring to it.
The rest of our time in Kaudulla was sure to be anticlimatic, and we had to hurry back anyway to make sure we were out of the park by 6:00pm. So we took a shortcut on a road through the jungle along a river. We actually saw a few more elephants in the jungle as we sped past, but everyone was satisfied by what we'd seen. I took a few photos of Panchali during this triumphant drive for her to later use on her website.
Back at The Other Corner, I tried to upload the photos and video I'd just taken to a server so I could send a Panchali a link to them, but the internet at The Other Corner was much worse than any of the other places we'd stayed.
We had another happy hour of freely-flowing beer and whiskey again this evening, and the food was great too because it included a few non-Sri-Lankan dishes, including a surprisingly good spaghetti with marinara sauce and batter-fried oyster mushrooms.
Later, after darkness fell, we went with one of the nature guides to look for scorpions living in holes they'd dug into the sides of termite mounds. To see them, we shined an ultraviolet light into the holes, which made the scorpions glow greenish-white if they were there. And a few of them were there.
Rice plants up close. Click to enlarge.
Weaver nests with a weaverbird. Click to enlarge.
A weaver nest up close. Click to enlarge.
An ibis in Habarana Lake this morning. Click to enlarge.
A giant squirrel at The Other Corner. Click to enlarge.
Rice drying on the roadway. In this case, cars are forced to drive somewhat on the shoulder. Click to enlarge.
Me with The Other Corner farm dog. Click to enlarge.
A well-disguised spider at Galkadwala. Click to enlarge.
There were rescue dogs at Galkadwala. Click to enlarge.
A cute rescue dog at Galkadwala. Click to enlarge.
Panchali giving a PowerPoint lecture about elephants at Galkadwala. Click to enlarge.
Another cute rescue dog at Galkadwala. Click to enlarge.
The Eat, Pray, Love jeep before we drove into Kaudulla National Park. Click to enlarge.
The spillway and dam for the reservoir at the heart of Kaudulla National Park. Click to enlarge.
The injured young elephant that we saw early in our drive through Kaudulla National Park. Click to enlarge.
This is a male elephant and those bumps are bullet injuries. Click to enlarge.
Ibises. Click to enlarge.
Pelicans and cormorants. Click to enlarge.
Elephants and jeeps. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen with the female elephants. Click to enlarge.
The pregnant elephant with a smaller friend. Click to enlarge.
The pregnant elephant's dangling vagina. Click to enlarge.
The pregnant elephant straining to give birth. Click to enlarge.
The moment of birth. Click to enlarge.
The moment of birth, seconds later. Click to enlarge.
Some video of the birth's aftermath.
The adults guide the baby to the jungle.
The adults with the baby.
The baby elephant standing among adults. Click to enlarge.
Panchali feeling happy as we drove out of the park. Click to enlarge.
This glowing thing is a scorpion, though it's hard to tell. Click to enlarge.
