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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
Shrews, Mice, Rats, Gerbils And Squirrels | Hearing From Sri Lanka’s Eminent Plebs
Sri Lanka, like ancient Rome, has strict - albeit invisible - notions of caste and class. And class, not being exclusively human, is no less apparent within its smaller mammalian world – its rodents, and rodent-like cousins: its rats, shrews, mice, and squirrels.
If the island’s tiny and elite mammalian senatorial class is represented by its elephants and leopards, its more capacious equestrian class comprises its monkeys, lorises, bears, mongooses, buffalo, anteaters, otters, jackals, hares, deer, civets, and wild cats.
Which, of course, leaves the plebs. Bottom of the pyramid, they may have been, but the Roman pleb took nothing lying down. Famed for their resistance, resilience, and passion, they lived their lives with little submission or demureness. They were eminent, not intimidated. As are Sri Lanka’s rodents, whose existence is anything but deferential or docile. And numbering over 30, they make up not just over a quarter of the island’s land-living mammal species, but also 50% of its endemic species. To know them is to understand a key part of what really makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
Naturally, plebs had a firm pecking order all of their own and at its apex stood the Tribunes of the plebs – the People’s Tribune, which in a mammalian context can only mean the rats. Like tribunes, rats are the busy, brisk, no-nonsense influencers of what really happens or doesn’t, and they abound in Sri Lanka. Their collective poor reputation and cordial hosting of many especially nasty diseases mark them out as a mammal best enjoyed from a distance. However, as Jo Nesbo observed, "a rat is neither good nor evil. It does what a rat has to do."
Two of the island’s ten rat species are endemic. Thirty centimetres in length, nose to tail, with steel grey fur and white undersides, the Ohiya Rat is named after a small village of barely 700 souls near Badulla. It lives quietly in forests and has gradually become scarcer, as biologists have counted. Its only other endemic cousin, the Nilgiri Rat, is no less endangered and is today found only in restricted highland locations such as the Knuckles, Horton Plains, and Nuwara Eliya. Little more than thirty-nine centimetres in length, nose to tail, its fur tends to be slightly redder than the typical grey of many of its relatives. Its name – Nillu, which means cease/settle/ stay/stand/stop - gives something of a clue about its willingness to get out and about.
To these two are joined an embarrassment of other rat species, many common throughout the world, others restricted to South and Southeast Asia, and all much more successful in establishing an enduring dominance. These include the massive Greater Bandicoot Rat and its slightly smaller cousin, the Lesser Bandicoot Rat. Measuring almost sixty centimetres in length, nose to tail, the Greater Bandicoot Rat is known in Sri Lanka as the Pig Rat. Aggressive, highly fertile, widespread, happy to eat practically anything and an enthusiastic carrier of many diseases, it is not the sort of creature to closely befriend. A marginally smaller giant of the rat world is the Lesser Bandicoot Rat, coming in at 40 centimetres in length, nose to tail. It is found in significant numbers throughout India and Sri Lanka, and its fondness for burrowing in farmland and gardens has earned it a reputation for destruction. It can be aggressive and is a reliable host to a range of nasty diseases, including plague, typhus, leptospirosis, and salmonellosis.
The Black Rat, or Rattus rattus, occurs throughout Sri Lanka and is represented by at least five distinct subspecies: the Common House Rat, the Egyptian House Rat, the Indian House Rat, the Common Ceylon House Rat, and the Ceylon Highland Rat. None is much longer than thirty-three centimetres nose to tail, and despite their reputation for being black, they also sport the occasional lighter brown fur. They are phenomenally successful, with almost every country in the world calling them home, including Sri Lanka. They are also disconcertingly resilient transmitters of many diseases, with their blood harbouring large numbers of infectious bacteria, including those that cause bubonic plague.
Three other rats are restricted to South Asia: Blanford's Rat, the Indian Bush Rat, and the Indian Soft-Furred Rat. Indeed, Blanford's Rat, also known as the White-Tailed Wood Rat, is found in impressive numbers throughout India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Measuring thirty-five centimetres in length, nose to tail, it has the classic grey fur of the kind of rat that scares most people. The Indian Bush Rat is also found widely across India and Sri Lanka. It even boasts a tiny pocket-sized colony in Iran. At twenty-five centimetres in length, nose to tail, it is smaller than many other rats. It has rather beautiful fur that is speckled yellow, black, and reddish, as if it had wandered out of a hair salon, unable to make up its mind about which exact hair dye to ask for, opting instead for a splash of everything. The ultimate C-list celebrity, the beautiful Indian Soft Furred Rat, is more than happy to make its home at any altitude and almost any place from India, Nepal, and Pakistan to Sri Lanka. So ubiquitous and successful is it that it is listed as being of no concern whatsoever on the registers of environmentalists troubled by species decline. Barely 30 centimetres nose to tail, it has brown to yellow fur on its back and white across its tummy.
The devil of the rat world is undoubtedly the Brown Rat, which boasts a wide range of alternative names all associated either with Lucifer, Satan, Abaddon, Beelzebub, or streets, sewers, or wharves. Immortalised by Dickens, it has been studied and domesticated more than most mammals and inhabits almost every continent, not least Sri Lanka. It is large – over 50 centimetres nose to tail. It is happy to consume nearly anything, is highly social, produces up to 5 litters a year, and, according to more informed scientists, can experience positive emotions. A final rat, Tatera Sinhaleya, known only from fossil records, bade farewell to the island many thousands of years ago.
If rats are the tribunes of the mammalian world, then mice are certainly its aediles, a post in the Roman Republic reserved for men responsible for the upkeep of the city, and so, by nature, meticulous, attentive, persistent. Just like Sri Lanka’s seven mouse species, nearly half of which are also endemic.
The ultra-rare Sri Lankan Spiny Mouse leads these native, endemic, and patriotic rodents. It is now so endangered that it can be seen in only very few locations. A mere maximum of 18 centimetres in length, from nose to tail, its reddish grey back and sides morph into white underparts, with huge, gorgeous, smooth, scooped-out ears that stand like parasols above large dark eyes. It is a mouse to fall in love with.
The similar, and somewhat confusingly named, Mayor’s Spiny Mouse also inhabits the smaller end of the mouse spectrum and comes in two (still quite widespread) variants – Mus Mayori Mayori, which inhabit the hill country; and Mus Mayori Pococki, which prefers the low wetlands. Telling them apart is almost impossible; both are covered with reddish-grey fur and exhibit relatively small ears. Seeing them is also a challenge, for they are both nocturnal creatures. One of their more interesting (albeit worrying) points of mouse difference is their capacity to carry quite so many other creatures: from mites, ticks, and sucking lice to small scorpions.
The last of the endemic mice is the Ceylon Highland Long-Tailed Tree Mouse. Discovered in 1929 by the Dutch tea planter, Adriaan Nolthenius, it is an increasingly rare creature, little more than 21 centimetres in length, nose to tail. It is found in Sri Lanka’s hill country, where it lives in trees, venturing out only by night. Like most mice, it has reddish-brown fur that occasionally grows darker, but compared to its many cousins, it has somewhat disappointingly small ears.
These tiny, loyal partisans are joined by a range of other mice typically found across South and Southeast Asia, including the fetching Indian Field Mouse. Measuring a tiny 13 centimetres in length, nose to tail, the Indian Field Mouse is one of those mammals of the Indian subcontinent that has long-term residency rights in Sri Lanka, where it is found almost everywhere. It is all a mouse aims to be, with a small, rounded, hunched body, lovely, rounded, smooth ears, and light brown to white fur.
Mouse pet owners and scientists love the almost domesticated Indian House Mouse, and, regrettably, it is regularly used in laboratories. It is widely distributed across Asia, and in urban areas, it has become almost a tame companion to the humans it lives among. Rarely more than 20 centimetres in length, nose to tail, it is one of the world's most studied and understood mammals, with its typical behavioural characteristics itemised, even down to the differences it exhibits when it lives in sandy dunes rather than in an apartment.
The Indian Long-Tailed Tree Mouse is notable for playing host to an especially undesirable tick. Also known as the Indian Long-Tailed Climbing Mouse, it is common throughout South and Southeast Asia. It grows to little more than twenty centimetres in length, nose to tail, and sports reddish brown fur that fades to white on its underparts. It is widely distributed – but not a creature to go out of your way to befriend, for it is notorious for spreading the tick-borne viral Kyasanur Forest Disease, which causes headaches, chills, muscle pain, and vomiting, and can take months to recover from.
The final mouse on the island is the somewhat clumsily named Ceylon Field Mouse, whose home actually stretches from Sri Lanka to Cambodia. It happily populates almost all kinds of habitats. It is often called the Fawn Colour Mouse for its light fur and grows to little more than 15 centimetres in length, nose to tail.
The role of Censor was reserved in Rome for the best of plebs, those best able to observe, direct and order things; and with their long, pointed, mobile snouts, tiny watchful eyes, and hearing made acute by ultrasonic vocalisations, the next of the island’s mammalian plebs, the shrews, look every inch the censor. Of the ten shrews found on the island, a staggering six are considered to be endemic. Lilliputian they may be in size, but for any species, this is a more-than-commendable achievement.
Modest and nocturnal, shrews rarely hit the headlines – yet this was what they did back on New Year’s Day 1924, a very special year for Joseph Pearson, a young biologist who had come to Sri Lanka from Liverpool to assume the position of Director of the Colombo Museum. That morning, as the rest of Colombo’s beau monde were nursing hangovers and trying to rid their heads of the tune of Auld Lang Syne, he discovered what would come to be called Pearson's Long-Clawed Shrew. At the time, it would have been a much more common sight than it is today, commonly found in forests and grasslands – habitats that are now so embattled as to render the endemic creature highly endangered. It is at the petite spectrum of island shrews, measuring just twelve centimetres nose to tail and sporting rather mundane grey-brown fur.
The newspaper headlines screamed once more in 2007 when an entirely new endemic species of Sri Lankan shrew was agreed upon: the Sinharaja White-Toothed Shrew. The result of extensive research carried out by a handful of distinguished scientists was that what had been masquerading in Sinharaja as the Ceylon Long-Tailed Shrew was actually a different shrew species, one that had, till then, not been adequately recognised or identified. A closer study of its bone structure, along with the simple observation that it had a shorter tail, led to the formal recognition of this new endemic species. However, the resulting Sinharaja White-Toothed Shrew is so restricted in distribution as to be almost entirely invisible, and has been found in only two areas of the edge of the Sinharaja Forest.
The island’s four other endemic shrews also amount to a shrew-spotters' holy grail, being both highly endangered and markedly restricted to just certain parts of the island.
At barely twenty centimetres long, nose to nail, with grey fur and a preference for subtropical or tropical forests, the Ceylon Jungle Shrew is determinedly nocturnal. At little more than centimetres nose to tail, the Ceylon Long-Tailed Shrew is so deeply threatened by habitat loss and logging that it has recently only been recorded in 5 highly fragmented areas in the Central and Sabaragamuwa provinces, despite its record of living as happily in the high mountain forests as much as the lowland ones. Covered in predictably modest brown fur with hints of grey, there is little about its appearance to help mark out the treasured and rare life to which it still attempts to cleave. Barely any larger is the Ceylon Highland Shrew. Highly endangered and restricted to the country's central highlands, it presents itself in an unapologetic style, rat-like and grey, with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude that offers little help to environmental publicists eager to drum up sympathy for the endangered animal it merits.
The Ceylon Pigmy Shrew (Suncus Etruscus Fellowes-Gordoni) takes its characterisation to heart, being so tiny as to measure nine centimetres, nose to tail barely. But though minuscule, it is a much more handsome shrew than many of its relatives, and sports fur that is nicely chocolate-brown to dark grey. As benefits so small a beast, it has a commendably long Latin moniker, much of it deriving from being named for Marjory née Fellowes-Gordon, the wife of the amateur Dutch naturalist who first recorded it. Highly endangered, it has been recorded from the low-mountain rainforests of the Sabaragamuwa and Central Provinces, with a possible third sighting in the Western Province.
Going back into the newspaper cuttings before 1924 and 2007, you discover that 1856 was as big a year for shrews as it ever was for humans. The Crimea War came to an end, the Second Opium War erupted, the first casino was approved in Monte Carlo, and a diminutive nine-inch shrew, to be named Horsfield’s Shrew, was discovered. But in the almost 200 years that were to follow, scientists gave what amounted to the cold shoulder to the pocket-sized beast, and even to this day it remains little understood or studied, its distribution across India and Sri Lanka only patchily comprehended, and its habits and description limited to a few notes about its unremarkable brown grey fur.
Obscurity has not troubled the Asian House Shrew - more notably called the Common Indian Musk Shrew - and its very close cousin, the Indian Grey Musk Rat Shrew. Both are so widely found as to be considered invasive species across South and Southeast Asia. Able to live almost anywhere, they breed with alarming ease and eat anything vaguely edible to keep their large rat-like (fifteen-centimetre nose to tail) bodies in peak condition.
But for Kelaart's Long Tailed Shrew, a veil descends. A Burger from an extended, established family and with numerous scientific discoveries to his name, Kelaart was also remembered as the man who discovered this species. Kelaart's Long-Tailed Shrew is now restricted to the grasslands, swamps, and forests of Sri Lanka and southern India. A colossal (for shrews) twenty centimetres in length nose to tail, it has grey-black fur and is ever more endangered, mainly due to shrinking habitat options. The species has managed to cling to both its name and its original scientific evaluation, unlike many other shrews who suffer the continual revaluation, name changes and shifting designations of over-busy shrew scientists; but not so poor Kelaart, who was to die, just forty-one years old, on a ship bound for England.
The final category of mammalian plebeians is the gladiator class, not, of course, a class only occupied by plebs, as slaves, prisoners, and condemned criminals also found their way into their ranks. But this did not prevent the gladiators from becoming celebrities and pop stars of ancient Rome, their extraordinary agility, speed, and balance making them a perfect facsimile of Sri Lanka’s six squirrels.
Not only can the island’s squirrels leap up to 6 feet between branches, but their 180-degree rotating ankles also allow them to climb or hang upside down with their heads facing forward. Their claws give them the surest of grips, whilst their tails act as airborne rubbers for better steerage. Super-fast, their movements are crafted as much by careful planning as by learning. All feast on almost any plants, including nuts, seeds, fruits, fungi, and green vegetation, and have been known to enrich their diet with bird eggs and insects, too. Their constant nibbling, of course, wears down their teeth, and so, in a little bit of evolution that mankind might have benefited from too, their teeth keep on growing to make up the loss. Collectively, they are what rats might be if rats had any sense of fashion or PR. Nimble, beautiful, curious, and cute, they are rodents merely by genus. Even so, there remains something edgy about them. It is a squirrel after all who provokes the discovery of a massive diamond in F Scott Fitzgerald’s story “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” a tale of excess and debauchery.
The unrivalled leader of the squirrel world is the Grizzled Giant Squirrel, a massive beast with a nose-to-tail length of 1.5 metres and death-defying skills that enable it to make the most impossible leaps from tree to tree. In Sri Lanka, it hugs the central highlands and is accompanied by two other sub-variants. The Highland Giant Squirrel, which sometimes goes under the nom de plume of the Long-tailed Giant Squirrel, has a pale tummy and a black head and upper body. It prefers life in the hilly centre of the island – Kandy and Nuwara Eliya, for example. Smaller and lighter in colour is the Lowland Giant Squirrel - sometimes rather unkindly called the Common Giant Squirrel.
All three are impressively indolent. Although they pretend to be active by day and sleep at night, their daytime activities usually end after 10 am and resume only for a few hours after 4 pm. In between these rare moments of activity, they lie spread-eagled across tree boughs or in specially built nests and wisely keep out of sight of villagers, to whom their flesh is considered something of a delicacy. Grizzled brown, with white legs, stomach, and frosted face, they have excellent vision but poor hearing, which is something of a blessing for them as their cry - a shrill staccato cackle – is the sort of sound that can easily curdle milk.
But it is the Indian Giant Flying Squirrel that is the most mobile of all squirrels, elegantly avian due to the remarkable wing membrane it has evolved between its limbs to enable it to glide, parachute-style and in total silence - like the 1891 Lilienthal Glider that marked man’s first recorded flight, near Potsdam. When not in use, this membrane is something of an encumbrance, restricting its non-flight speed and agility and requiring a bizarre choreography of gliding and climbing to return to its tree-hole home. It comes in two sizes; the Grey Flying Squirrel is the larger of the two. It is silver-grey to dark brown in colour, with large eyes, and is found throughout the central parts of the island. Lesser-studied, shyer, and so endangered that it is often considered extinct is the second flying squirrel, the Small Flying Squirrel, which sticks to the wet, forested parts of the island, like the Knuckles, Adam's Peak, Sinharaja, and Kitulgala.
Two of Sri Lanka’s six squirrel species are endemic: the Dusky-Striped Squirrel and Layard's Palm Squirrel. Way back in 1913, the year before the Great War, Picasso first lit up the art world by exhibiting "Guitar, Glass, and Bottle". At the Armoury Show in New York, the squirrel world was lit by its own bright spotlight: an agreement between biologists – carried out through the good offices of the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, to redefine what was thought to be the Indian Nilgiri striped squirrel, as a quite separate species unique to Sri Lanka - the Dusky Striped Squirrel. To the casual observer, the differences would be hard to spot, but for Punchi Lena, as it is known in Sinhala, it meant recognition at long last. Despite being the smallest of the island’s squirrels, the Dusky Striped Squirrel is, at 60-70 grams, larger than its Nilgiri cousin, and has longer, thicker stripes. But it is rare, found in the wet-zone rainforests of the southwest, such as Sinharaja, though the odd sighting has also been recorded on Horton Plains, in Nuwara Eliya, and in Kandy.
The island’s only other endemic squirrel is Layard's Palm Squirrel - named for Edgar Leopold Layard, one of those legendary Victorian all-rounders, who took on a diplomatic career, the better to document the natural world, a passion he put down to a lack of siblings when growing up. He spent ten years on the island, leaving behind a variety of animals named after him, including a parrot and the squirrel that still bears his name. It is sometimes known as the Flame-Striped Jungle Squirrel for the beautiful markings that run along its back. It is about 30 centimetres nose to tail, with black fur that fades to reddish-brown on its stomach, and is found throughout the central highlands. By day, they forage for fruit and nuts; by night, they chatter from tree to tree, living, like swans, in pairs that bond for life. With their natural forest habitat eroded steadily, they are categorised as Vulnerable.
The final two squirrels on the island are ones shared with India. The Indian Palm or Three-Striped Palm Squirrel is the most widespread squirrel here, found in both rural and urban areas. Its markings are very similar to those of the endemic Layard's Palm Squirrel, with whom it is often confused. The tiny, dark brown Nilgiri Striped Squirrel is the mystery of the pack, for almost nothing is known about it except that it is different from the Dusky-Striped Squirrel, with which it was once confused. Indeed, some zoologists believe that it no longer exists on the island at all.
The last of the island rodents lives in a special plebian category all of its own - the sole ambassador for a beast that boasts 110 species worldwide but just one in Sri Lanka. The Ceylon Gerbil, or Antilope-Rat, is the Cicero of the country: inquisitive, curious, social, and surprisingly uncuddly, given their popularity as pets. They have all the characteristics of that great plebeian, Cicero, who rose to the highest offices of the Roman Republic before being murdered by thugs employed by Mark Anthony. Happily widespread, the Ceylon Gerbil (Tatera Indica Ceylonica) is a distinct variant of the Indian Gerbil. Well distributed across the island, it lives in small colonies inside nests lined with dry grasses at the end of deep labyrinthine burrows. It is notably unneighbourly, aggressive and territorial with gerbils from other colonies. Like most gerbils, it is highly fertile, with pregnancies lasting under a month and producing up to 9 young, which will themselves reach sexual maturity within 4 months. It is tiny – a little more than 4 centimetres head to tail and clothed in brownish grey fur, all the better to pass unnoticed.
“Every animal,” noted Cicero in De Amicitia, his treatise on Friendship, “loves itself.” And were he here with us today, surveying the obscurity, poor press and endangered status of the island’s rodents and their closer cousins, he might have added, “and we must love them more.”
That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.