Conserving Sri Lanka’s Apex Predator

As part of my bachelor’s degree requirements I undertook an internship with the Wilderness and Wildlife Conservation Trust, Sri Lanka who worked towards conserving wild cats of Sri Lanka. Their main focus was conserving Sri Lankans Leopards due to the high human-leopard conflict issues that were occurring in the country. The NGO was run by Canadian ecologist, Dr. Andrew Kittle.

I commenced my internship in October 2015. My initial task was to understand the landscape and land uses in certain areas in the country where the leopard population was thriving using maps. I mapped out wildlife corridors which are areas used by animals to move from place to place when environmental conditions change. It was very interesting to find that leopards were able to adapt and thrive in any area as long as there was sufficient vegetation cover and tall trees. This aids us as leopards have learnt to avoid human contact while ensuring the population is stable and being able coexist among villages.

In early January 20216 I was sent to Vavuniya to assist Honour’s student, Samith, from the University of Jaffna to track leopards and collect scat samples at Vavunikulam National Park. This was my first visit to northern Sri Lanka and I was the first person in my family to do so after the civil war. I travelled to and from Vavuniya by train for the first time by myself. The national park was within the former war zone and despite the war being over for over 6 years it was still being de-mined. Around 20 undetonated mines were thrown in a large hole and detonated simultaneously. The sound caused was deafening and could be heard for miles. The leader of the de-mining team gave us very strict instructions to stay on the track where it was safe from unexploded mines. Due to the recent rains, parts of certain tracks were flooded so we had to walk barefoot through certain sections to get to the other side. We found leopard footprints and scat along a majority of the tracks we hiked. We spent the night at Samith’s guide’s house where we were fed deer meat for dinner. The encroachment of village houses inside the park and the effects of the war were very evident. I had the opportunity to speak to a villager about the conflict caused by leopards and he informed me that leopards were frequently hunting their cattle at night.

My next task was to analyse leopard scat in order to differentiate the diet between different areas of the country. This was extremely messy, but it had its fun moments. In order to analyse the dung we had to dry the scat samples using an oven. We conducted our analysis in a high school lab. On our first day we placed our samples in the oven and ended up stinking up the whole lab due to a malfunction in equipment. It was embarrassing, but also funny that this mishap occurred on our very first day in a school lab as it peaked the interest of most of the teachers and all the students who were in the vicinity of the labs. Many of the kids were so interested in our research that we had to answer so many questions even though it was all related to leopard scat. The school headmaster who was an Englishmen was very amused by our mishap that he encouraged us to continue and said he was looking forward to the next mishap. I think we gave the school kids in the lab that day a wonderful present as they were allowed to go home early as the lab was smelling of poo. Fortunately we continued our work for two weeks with no further incident. We were fortunate to find mongoose hair among the prey eaten and also found bones from cattle and claws from a domestic cat. One things for sure someone is missing a pet cat in the hill country and we found it, well only its claws.

The focus of our study shifted to a tea estate in the hill country. With the use of camera traps we identified 12 individuals in this single estate. Leopard reside and use the tea estates as corridors to move between forest patches which border the estates. We identified 27 individuals roaming around 20 tea estates; 5 males, 18 females and 4 cubs. I have been spending 4 days a week in the jungle monitoring leopards and their movements using camera traps, the only way to track them, as they are very elusive and avoid human contact.

The leopards are using the same tracks the tea pluckers use. They have adapted to moving around using these paths only at night so that they completely avoid contact with humans. Ideally I wanted to work at night as camera trap images showed a peak in leopard activity from 7pm-3am.

Two reasons prevent us from working at night.

1) The terrain is extremely dangerous with high cliffs. One wrong turn could cause you to fall 1000 feet. We have a rather worn and weary Toyota Hilux double cab which does very well on these rough roads, but needs constant maintenance. But there is only so far the jeep can travel so we have to make the rest of the journey on foot. The remote locations in which we work would be unsafe to travel at night especially with mist.

2) The more important reason, since the leopards have adapted to avoiding humans and travelling in the tea estates only at night we don’t want to change the leopard’s behaviour by ourselves being out at night and startling a leopard. If a leopard is startled we are sure to be attacked. All previous leopard attacks on humans in Sri Lanka have been due to provocation or startling a leopard. Therefore to keep their nocturnal behaviour intact and to avoid being attacked ourselves we decided to avoid working at night.

On 25th January 2016 at around 5pm my boss, Andrew and I were as usual in the jungle going to check one of our camera traps, a track we have been on and used on many occasions. On this particular day we were ambushed by bees. We had no warning, heard no noise, but just got swamped by a whole swarm. We were chased over 700m downhill all the way to our jeep. Unfortunately there was no body of water in the immediate vicinity so we both jumped under a tap and got a few of the bees off us. We ran back to the jeep and they followed us in. I was driving on this trip so I had the keys and naturally jumped into the driving seat. I had been stung very badly so Andrew and I had to swap seats without opening the doors so that he could drive me straight to the hospital. I struggled to stay awake till I got to the hospital. We were both killing bees on our way to the hospital which made our journey even more stressful. I was at the hospital in 15 minutes and received excellent medical care immediately. It was an agonising 2 hours for me because they were pulling stings off me while injecting me with antihistamines and sedatives. I was in the hospital for 24 hours for monitoring. The doctors who treated me did not expect me to pull through the night because I had over a hundred stings in me. Thanks to my longish hair the stings had not penetrated to my scalp, but I had to have a very crude haircut at the hospital to get the bees and the stings out of my head and hair. They also said my age was against me, as at the age of 22 my body did not have enough resistance to fight the severity of the stings. But lo and behold I was up and walking the next morning to the amazement of everyone at the hospital. Andrew had been stung to a lesser extent so he was released from hospital the night of our attack itself. I was back at work in a couple of days. We found the bees nest and noticed that someone had burnt it so due to the nest being disturbed by someone else, the two conservationists got attacked! Andrew however contracted cellulitis a few days later due to a secondary infection and had to have surgery on his left hand. He had to be away from work for about a month and I had to drive him everywhere after he was given the go ahead by his doctors to go back to the jungle. Anyway thanks to God’s grace we are both alive and well and were able to return to conserving and studying leopards. I conducted several awareness programs for tourists, owners of tea estates and their employees, I also had to conduct an awareness programme for the tea estate people in Tamil – I was very relieved that it was well received as I had not done a presentation in Tamil since 2010.

With my love for working with big cats, I was so happy that I had the opportunity to work towards conserving leopards for six months. Though I never saw one in the wild while I was working with them, it was comforting to know that they were still present in the vicinity and going about their lives. I now head to Brisbane to read for my Masters degree, but will cherish the memories and hope to apply the concepts learnt from this human-wildlife conflict project to conserve other species of wild cats in the world in the future.