{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Sri Lanka Podcast: Island Stories","title":"The Cat’s Pyjamas: In Pursuit of Sri Lanka’s Wild Cats","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1058,"description":"Counting Sri Lanka’s wild cats is no minor feat. None of them cares to be counted, still less seen. Some have vanished; and at least one is the subject of such impassioned scientistic debate that its righteous credentials as distinct species or sub species still hang in the balance.   Even so, of the many mighty mammals that once sat, enthroned, like Phidias’ Olympian Zeus gazing at the lesser world around him, so too did a dazzling assembly of cats lord it over the island, at the very apex of Sri Lanka’s food chain. Some of the most glamorous members of this ancient feline club have long since vanished, predators who themselves fell prey, not to other predators but to climate change and the accompanying alterations in vegetation.  Others, thriving, or perhaps now just clinging on to life with grim resilience in other corners of the world, never made it to the island in the first place. This, today, is not the country where you might glimpse cougars, lynx, ocelot, or jaguars slipping stealthily through scrub forests.  But, as benefits of one the world’s most notable biospheres, the island has instead as astonishing variety of surviving predator cats, truly the cat’s pyjamas, including one that has moulded its appearance so intimately around a particular environment that scientists have eagerly given it endemic status three times over, with a fourth, identified from a small town near Nuwara Eliya, waiting for taxological promotion like a good, albeit dead man before the Catholic Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. Today, tourists come in teeming numbers to catch a glimpse of the Ceylon Leopard. Indeed, some are so overwrought if denied the sight they are wont to demand their money back from hapless safari operators. For the leopard, shrewd, secretive, elusive, has its own quite firm ideas about just to whom and when it might offer itself up for a selfie.  It is without doubt the most extraordinary endemic jewel in Sri Lanka’s mammalian crown and the largest of the...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/7CUca6C9EALNbLyQZMPMNrpo1fyKq_MC2tHuUC5ZiGs/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85MWIx/NzY5MWZhY2Q4NmM5/ZTAzZTc1YjE4ZTZh/ZGY3Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}